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The Atonement 
And The Modern Mind 



WORKS BY JAMES DENNEY, D.D. 

THE DEATH OF CHRIST 

Its Place and Interpretation in the New Testament 

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of atonement since the appearance of Dr. Dale's epoch making 
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THE ATONEMENT AND THE MODERN MIND 

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STUDIES IN THEOLOGY 
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The Atonement 

and 

The Modern Mind 



By 

James Denney, D.D. 

Professor of New Testament Language, Literature, and 
Theology, United Free Church College, Glasgow 



New York 
A. C. Armstrong & Son 

3 y 5 West 1 8 th Street, near 5 th Avenue 
1903 



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Copyright, igoj 
By A. C. Armstrong and Son 

Published, November, 1903 



PREFACE 

THE three chapters which follow have 
already appeared in The Expositor, 
and may be regarded as a supplement to the 
writer's work on The Death of Christ: its 
place and interpretation in the New Testa- 
ment. It was no part of his intention in that 
study to ask or to answer all the questions 
raised by New Testament teaching on the sub- 
ject; but, partly from reviews of The Death 
of Christ, and still more from a considerable 
private correspondence to which the book 
gave rise, he became convinced that some- 
thing further should be attempted to com- 
mend the truth to the mind and conscience 
of the time. The difficulties and misunder- 
standings connected with it spring, as far as 
they can be considered intellectual, mainly 



6 PREFACE 

from two sources. Either the mind is pre- 
occupied with a conception of the world 
which, whether men are conscious of it or 
not, forecloses all the questions which are 
raised by any doctrine of atonement, and 
makes them unmeaning; or it labours under 
some misconception as to what the New Tes- 
tament actually teaches. Broadly speaking, 
the first of these conditions is considered 
in the first two chapters, and the second in 
the last. The title — The Atonement and the 
Modern Mind — might seem to promise a 
treatise, or even an elaborate system of theol- 
ogy; but though it would cover a work of 
vastly larger scope than the present, it is not 
inappropriate to any attempt, however humble, 
to help the mind in which we all live and 
move to reach a sympathetic comprehension 
of the central truth in the Christian religion. 
The purpose of the writer is evangelic, what- 
ever may be said of his method; it is to 
commend the Atonement to the human mind, 



PREFACE 7 

as that mind has been determined by the in- 
fluences and experiences of modern times, 
and to win the mind for the truth of the 
Atonement. 

With the exception of a few paragraphs, 
these pages were delivered as lectures to a 
summer school of Theology which met in 
Aberdeen, in June of this year. The school 
was organised by a committee of the Asso- 
ciation of Former Students of the United Free 
Church College, Glasgow; and the writer, as 
a member and former President of the Asso- 
ciation, desires to take the liberty of inscrib- 
ing his work to his fellow-students. 

Glasgow, September 1903. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

TAGE 

Preliminary Definition of the Subject .... 13 



CHAPTER II 
Sin and the Divine Reaction Against It .... 64 

CHAPTER III 
Christ and Man in the Atonement 108 



The Atonement and The Modern Mind 



THE ATONEMENT 
And THE MODERN MIND 

CHAPTER I 

PRELIMINARY DEFINITION OF THE SUBJECT 

IT will be admitted by most Christians that 
if the Atonement, quite apart from precise 
definitions of it, is anything to the mind, it is 
everything. It is the most profound of all 
truths, and the most recreative. It determines 
more than anything else our conceptions of 
God, of man, of history, and even of nature ; 
it determines them, for we must bring them all 
in some way into accord with it. It is the 
inspiration of all thought, the impulse and 
the law of all action, the key, in the last resort, 
to all suffering. Whether we call it a fact 



14 THE ATONEMENT 

or a truth, a power or a doctrine, it is that 
in which the differentia of Christianity, its . 
peculiar and exclusive character, is specifically 
shown ; it is the focus of revelation, the point 
at which we see deepest into the truth of God, 
and come most completely under its power. 
For those who recognise it at all it is Chris- 
tianity in brief ; it concentrates in itself, as in 
a germ of infinite potency, all that the wisdom, 
power and love of God mean in relation to 
sinful men. 

Accordingly, when we speak of the Atone- 
ment and the modern mind, we are really 
speaking of the modern mind and the Chris- 
tian religion. The relation between these two 
magnitudes may vary. The modern mind is 
no more than a modification of the human 
mind as it exists in all ages, and the relation 
of the modern mind to the Atonement is one 
phase — it may be a specially interesting or 
a specially well-defined phase — of the peren- 
nial relation of the mind of man to the truth 



AND THE MODERN MIND 15 

of God. There is always an affinity between 
the two, for God made man in His own image, 
and the mind can only rest in truth ; but there 
is always at the same time an antipathy, for 
man is somehow estranged from God, and 
resents Divine intrusion into his life. This is 
the situation at all times, and therefore in 
modern times ; we only need to remark that 
when the Atonement is in question, the situa- 
tion, so to speak, becomes acute. All the ele- 
ments in it define themselves more sharply. 
If there is sympathy between the mind and the 
truth, it is a profound sympathy, which will 
carry the mind far; if there are lines of ap- 
proach, through which the truth can find ac- 
cess to the mind, they are lines laid deep in 
the nature of things and of men, and the access 
which the truth finds by them is one from 
which it will not easily be dislodged. On the 
other hand, if it is antagonism which is roused 
in the mind by the Atonement, it is an an- 
tagonism which feels that everything is at 



\6 THE ATONEMENT 

stake. The Atonement is a reality of such 
a sort that it can make no compromise. The 
man who fights it knows that he is righting 
for his life, and puts all his strength into the 
battle. To surrender is literally to give up 
himself, to cease to be the man he is, and to 
become another man. For the modern mind, 
therefore, as for the ancient, the attraction and 
the repulsion of Christianity are concentrated 
at the same point ; the cross of Christ is 
man's only glory, or it is his final stumbling- 
block. 

What I wish to do in these papers is so to 
present the facts as to mediate, if possible, 
between the mind of our time and the Atone- 
ment — so to exhibit the specific truth of 
Christianity as to bring out its affinity for 
what is deepest in the nature of man and 
in human experience — so to appreciate the 
modern mind itself, and the influences which 
have given it its constitution and temper, as to 
discredit what is false in it, and enlist on the 



AND THE MODERN MIND 17 

side of the Atonement that which is profound 
and true. And if any one is disposed to 
marvel at the ambition or the conceit of such 
a programme, I would ask him to consider if 
it is not the programme prescribed to every 
Christian, or at least to every Christian min- 
ister, who would do the work of an evangelist. 
To commend the eternal truth of God, as it is 
finally revealed in the Atonement, to the mind 
in which men around us live and move and 
have their being, is no doubt a difficult and 
perilous task ; but if we approach it in a right 
spirit, it need not tempt us to any presump- 
tion; it cannot tempt us, as long as we feel 
that it is our duty. ' Who is sufficient for these 
things ? . . . Our sufficiency is of God.' 

The Christian religion is a historical re- 
ligion, and whatever we say about it must rest 
upon historical ground. We cannot define it 
from within, by reference merely to our indi- 
vidual experience. Of course it is equally 
impossible to define it apart from experience; 



18 THE ATONEMENT 

the point is that such experience itself must 
be historically derived ; it must come through 
something outside of our individual selves. 
What is true of the Christian religion as a 
whole is pre-eminently true of the Atonement 
in which it is concentrated. The experience 
which it brings to us, and the truth which we 
teach on the basis of it, are historically medi- 
ated. They rest ultimately on that testimony 
to Christ which we find in the Scriptures and 
especially in the New Testament. No one 
can tell what the Atonement is except on this 
basis. No one can consciously approach it — 
no one can be influenced by it to the full 
extent to which it is capable of influencing 
human nature — except through this medium. 
We may hold that just because it is Divine, 
it must be eternally true, omnipresent in its 
gracious power; but even granting this, it is 
not known as an abstract or eternal somewhat ; 
it is historically, and not otherwise than his- 
torically, revealed. It is achieved by Christ, 



AND THE MODERN MIND 19 

and the testimony to Christ, on the strength 
of which we accept it, is in the last resort the 
testimony of Scripture. 

In saying so, I do not mean that the Atone- 
ment is merely a problem of exegesis, or that 
we have simply to accept as authoritative the 
conclusions of scholars as to the meaning of 
New Testament texts. The modern mind 
here is ready with a radical objection. The 
writers of the New Testament, it argues, were 
men like ourselves; they had personal limita- 
tions and historical limitations; their forms of 
thought were those of a particular age and 
upbringing; the doctrines they preached may 
have had a relative validity, but we cannot 
benumb our minds to accept them without 
question. The intelligence which has learned 
to be a law to itself, criticizing, rejecting, 
appropriating, assimilating, cannot deny its 
nature and suspend its functions when it 
opens the New Testament. It cannot make 
itself the slave of men, not even though the 



20 THE ATONEMENT 

men are Peter and Paul and John; no, not 
even though it were the Son of Man Himself. 
It resents dictation, not wilfully nor wantonly, 
but because it must; and it resents it all the 
more when it claims to be inspired. If, there- 
fore, the Atonement can only be received by 
those who are prepared from the threshold to 
acknowledge the inspiration and the conse- 
quent authority of Scripture, it can never be 
received by modern men at all. 

This line of remark is familiar inside the 
Church as well as outside. Often it is ex- 
pressed in the demand for a historical as 
opposed to a dogmatic interpretation of the 
New Testament, a historical interpretation 
being one to which we can sit freely, because 
the result to which it leads us is the mind of a 
time which we have survived and presumably 
transcended ; a dogmatic interpretation, on the 
other hand, being one which claims to reach 
an abiding truth, and therefore to have a pres- 
ent authority. A more popular and inconsist- 



AND THE MODERN MIND 21 

ent expression of the same mood may be found 
among those who say petulant things about 
the rabbinizing of Paul, but profess the utmost 
devotion to the words of Jesus. Even in a 
day of overdone distinctions, one might point 
out that interpretations are not properly to be 
classified as historical or dogmatic, but as true 
or false. If they are false, it does not matter 
whether they are called dogmatic or historical ; 
and if they are true, they may quite well be 
both. But this by the way. For my own 
part, I prefer the objection in its most radical 
form, and indeed find nothing in it to which 
any Christian, however sincere or profound his 
reverence for the Bible, should hesitate to 
assent. Once the mind has come to know 
itself, there can be no such thing for it as 
blank authority. It cannot believe things — 
the things by which it has to live — simply 
on the word of Paul or John. It is not irrev- 
erent, it is simply the recognition of a fact, if 
we add that it can just as little believe them 



22 THE ATONEMENT 

simply on the word of Jesus. 1 This is not the 
sin of the mind, but the nature and essence of 
mind, the being which it owes to God. If we 
are to speak of authority at all in this con- 
nection, the authority must be conceived as 
belonging not to the speaker but to that 
which he says, not to the witness but to the 
truth. Truth, in short, is the only thing 
which has authority for the mind, and the only 
way in which truth finally evinces its authority 
is by taking possession of the mind for itself. 
It may be that any given truth can only be 
reached by testimony — that is, can only come 
to us by some historical channel ; but if it is a 
truth of eternal import, if it is part of a revela- 
tion of God the reception of which is eternal 
life, then its authority lies in itself and in its 
power to win the mind, and not in any witness 
however trustworthy. 

1 Of course this does not touch the fact that the whole ' authority ' 
of the Christian religion is in Jesus Himself — in His historical 
presence in the world, His words and works, His life and death and 
resurrection. He is the truth, the acceptance of which by man is 
life eternal. 



AND THE MODERN MIND 23 

Hence in speaking of the Atonement, 
whether in preaching or in theologising, it is 
quite unnecessary to raise any question about 
the inspiration of Scripture, or to make any 
claim of ' authority ' either for the Apostles 
or for the Lord. Belief in the inspiration of 
Scripture is neither the beginning of the 
Christian life nor the foundation of Christian 
theology ; it is the last conclusion — a con- 
clusion which becomes every day more sure — 
to which experience of the truth of Scripture 
leads. When we tell, therefore, what the 
Atonement is, we are telling it not on the 
authority of any person or persons whatever, 
but on the authority of the truth in it by 
which it has won its place in our minds and 
hearts. We find this truth in the Christian 
Scriptures undoubtedly, and therefore we prize 
them ; but the truth does not derive its au- 
thority from the Scriptures, or from those who 
penned them. On the contrary, the Script- 
ures are prized by the Church because through 



24 THE ATONEMENT 

them the soul is brought into contact with 
this truth. No doubt this leaves it open to 
any one who does not see in Scripture what 
we see, or who is not convinced as we are of 
its truth, to accuse us here of subjectivity, of 
having no standard of truth but what appeals 
to us individually, but I could never feel the 
charge a serious one. It is like urging that 
a man does not see at all, or does not see 
truly, because he only sees with his own eyes. 
This is the only authentic kind of seeing yet 
known to mankind. We do not judge at all 
those who do not see what we do. We do 
not know what hinders them, or whether they 
are at all to blame for it; we do not know 
how soon the hindrance is going to be put 
out of the way. To-day, as at the beginning, 
the light shines in the darkness, and the dark- 
ness comprehends it not. But that is the 
situation which calls for evangelists ; not a sit- 
uation in which the evangelist is called to 
renounce his experience and his vocation. 



AND THE MODERN MIND 25 

What, then, is the Atonement, as it is pre- 
sented to us in the Scriptures, and vindicates 
for itself in our minds the character of truth, 
and indeed, as I have said already, the char- 
acter of the ultimate truth of God? 

The simplest expression that can be given 
to it in words is : Christ died for our sins. 
Taken by itself, this is too brief to be intel- 
ligible ; it implies many things which need to 
be made explicit both about Christ's relation 
to us and about the relation of sin and death. 
But the important thing, to begin with, is not 
to define these relations, but to look through 
the words to the broad reality which is inter- 
preted in them. What they tell us, and tell 
us on the basis of an incontrovertible experi- 
ence, is that the forgiveness of sins is for 
the Christian mediated through the death of 
Christ. In one respect, therefore, there is 
nothing singular in the forgiveness of sins : 
it is in the same position as every other bless- 
ing of which the New Testament speaks. It 



26 THE ATONEMENT 

is the presence of a Mediator, as Westcott says 
in one of his letters, which makes the Chris- 
tian religion what it is ; and the forgiveness 
of sins is mediated to us through Christ, just 
as the knowledge of God as the Father is 
mediated, or the assurance of a life beyond 
death. But there is something specific about 
the mediation of forgiveness; the gift and 
the certainty of it come to us, not simply 
through Christ, but through the blood of His 
Cross. The sum of His relation to sin is that 
He died for it. God forgives, but this is the 
way in which His forgiveness comes. He 
forgives freely, but it is at this cost to Himself 
and to the Son of His love. 

This, it seems to me, is the simplest possible 
statement of what the New Testament means 
by the Atonement, and probably there are few 
who would dispute its correctness. But it is 
possible to argue that there is a deep cleft in 
the New Testament itself, and that the teach- 
ing of Jesus on the subject of forgiveness is 



AND THE MODERN MIND 27 

completely at variance with that which we find 
in the Epistles, and which is implied in this 
description of the Atonement. Indeed there 
are many who do so argue. But to follow 
them would be to forget the place which Jesus 
has in His own teaching. Even if we grant 
that the main subject of that teaching is the 
Kingdom of God, it is as clear as anything can 
be that the Kingdom depends for its establish- 
ment on Jesus, or rather that in Him it is 
already established in principle ; and that all 
participation in its blessings depends on some 
kind of relation to Him. All things have been 
delivered to Him by the Father, and it is by 
coming under obligation to Him, and by that 
alone, that men know the Father. It is by 
coming under obligation to Him that they 
know the pardoning love of the Father, as 
well as everything else that enters into Chris- 
tian experience and constitutes the blessedness 
of life in the Kingdom of God. Nor is it 
open to any one to say that he knows this 



28 THE ATONEMENT 

simply because Christ has told it. We are 
dealing here with things too great to be simply 
told. If they are ever to be known in their 
reality, they must be revealed by God, they 
must rise upon the mind of man experimen- 
tally, in their awful and glorious truth, in 
ways more wonderful than words. They can 
be spoken about afterwards, but hardly before- 
hand. They can be celebrated and preached — 
that is, declared as the speaker's experience, 
delivered as his testimony — but not simply 
told. It was enough if Jesus made his disci- 
ples feel, as surely He did make them feel, 
not only in every word He spoke, but more 
emphatically still in His whole attitude toward 
them, that He was Himself the Mediator of the 
new covenant, and that all the blessings of the 
relation between God and man which we call 
Christianity were blessings due to Him. If 
men knew the Father, it was through Him. 
If they knew the Father's heart to the lost, it 
was through Him. Through Him, be it re- 



AND THE MODERN MIND 29 

membered, not merely through the words that 
He spoke. There was more in Christ than 
even His own wonderful words expressed, and 
all that He was and did and suffered, as well 
as what He said, entered into the convictions 
He inspired. But He knew this as well as 
His disciples, and for this very reason it is 
beside the mark to point to what He said, or 
rather to what He did not say, in confutation 
of their experience. For it is their experience 
— the experience that the forgiveness of sins 
was mediated to them through His cross — 
that is expressed in the doctrine of Atonement: 
He died for our sins. 

The objection which is here in view is most 
frequently pointed by reference to the parable 
of the prodigal son. There is no Atonement 
here, we are told, no mediation of forgiveness 
at all. There is love on the one side and peni- 
tence on the other, and it is treason to the pure 
truth of this teaching to cloud and confuse it 
with the thoughts of men whose Master was 



30 THE ATONEMENT 

over their heads often, but most of all here. 
Such a statement of the case is plausible, and 
judging from the frequency with which it occurs 
must to some minds be very convincing, but 
nothing could be more superficial, or more 
unjust both to Jesus and the apostles. A 
parable is a comparison, and there is a point 
of comparison in it on which everything turns. 
The more perfect the parable is, the more 
conspicuous and dominating will the point of 
comparison be. The parable of the prodigal 
illustrates this. It brings out, through a human 
parallel, with incomparable force and beauty, the 
one truth of the freeness of forgiveness. God 
waits to be gracious. His pardoning love rushes 
out to welcome the penitent. But no one who 
speaks of the Atonement ever dreams of ques- 
tioning this. The Atonement is concerned 
with a different point — not the freeness of 
pardon, about which all are agreed, but the cost 
of it ; not the spontaneity of God's love, which 
no one questions, but the necessity under which 



AND THE MODERN MIND 31 

it lay to manifest itself in a particular way if 
God was to be true to Himself, and to win the 
heart of sinners for the holiness which they had 
offended. The Atonement is not the denial 
that God's love is free ; it is that specific mani- 
festation or demonstration of God's free love 
which is demanded by the situation of men. 
One can hardly help wondering whether those 
who tell us so confidently that there is no 
Atonement in the parable of the prodigal have 
ever noticed that there is no Christ in it either 
— no elder brother who goes out to seek and to 
save the lost son, and to give his life a ransom 
for him. Surely we are not to put the Good 
Shepherd out of the Christian religion. Yet if 
we leave Him His place, we cannot make the 
parable of the prodigal the measure of Christ's 
mind about the forgiveness of sins. One part 
of His teaching it certainly contains — one part 
of the truth about the relation of God the 
Father to His sinful children; but another 
part of the truth was present, though not on 



32 THE ATONEMENT 

that occasion rendered in words, in the pres- 
ence of the Speaker, when 'all the publicans 
and sinners drew near to Him for to hear Him.' 
The love of God to the sinful was apprehended 
in Christ Himself, and not in what He said as 
something apart from Himself; on the contrary, 
it was in the identity of the speaker and the 
word that the power of the word lay; God's 
love evinced itself to men as a reality in Him, 
in His presence in the world, and in His atti- 
tude to its sin ; it so evinced itself, finally and 
supremely, in His death. It is not the idiosyn- 
crasy of one apostle, it is the testimony of the 
Church, a testimony in keeping with the whole 
claim made by Christ in His teaching and life 
and death: i in Him we have our redemption, 
through His blood, even the forgiveness of our 
trespasses.' And this is what the Atonement 
means: it means the mediation of forgiveness 
through Christ, and specifically through His 
death. Forgiveness, in the Christian sense of 
the term, is only realised as we believe in the 



AND THE MODERN MIND 33 

Atonement : in other words, as we come to feel 
the cost at which alone the love of God could 
assert itself as Divine and holy love in the souls 
of sinful men. We may say, if we please, that 
forgiveness is bestowed freely upon repentance ; 
but we must add, if we would do justice to the 
Christian position, that repentance in its ulti- 
mate character is the fruit of the Atonement. 
Repentance is not possible apart from the ap- 
prehension of the mercy of God in Christ. It 
is the experience of the regenerate — poeniten- 
tiam interpreter regenerationem, as Calvin says 
— and it is the Atonement which regenerates. 
This, then, in the broadest sense, is the truth 
which we wish to commend to the modern 
mind : the truth that there is forgiveness with 
God, and that this forgiveness comes to us 
only through Christ, and signally or specific- 
ally through His death. Unless it becomes 
true to us that Christ died for our sins we 
cannot appreciate forgiveness at its specific- 
ally Christian value. It cannot be for us 
3 



34 THE ATONEMENT 

that kind of reality, it cannot have for us that 
kind of inspiration, which it unquestionably 
is and has in the New Testament. 

But what, we must now ask, is the modern 
mind to which this primary truth of Chris- 
tianity has to be commended ? Can we diag- 
nose it in any general yet recognisable fashion, 
so as to find guidance in seeking access to it 
for the gospel of the Atonement ? There may 
seem to be something presumptuous in the 
very idea, as though any one making the 
attempt assumed a superiority to the mind 
of his time, an exemption from its limitations 
and prejudices, a power to see over it and 
round about it. All such presumption is of 
course disclaimed here; but even while we 
disclaim it, the attempt to appreciate the mind 
of our time is forced upon us. Whoever has 
tried to preach the gospel, and to persuade 
men of truth as truth is in Jesus, and espe- 
cially of the truth of God's forgiveness as it 
is in the death of Jesus for sin, knows that 



AND THE MODERN MIND 35 

there is a state of mind which is somehow 
inaccessible to this truth, and to which the 
truth consequently appeals in vain. I do not 
speak of unambiguous moral antipathy to the 
ideas of forgiveness and atonement, although 
antipathy to these ideas in general, as distinct 
from any given presentation of them, cannot 
but have a moral character, just as a moral 
character always attaches to the refusal to 
acknowledge Christ or to become His debtor; 
but of something which, though vaguer and 
less determinate, puts the mind wrong, so to 
speak, with Christianity from the start. It is 
clear, for instance, in all that has been said 
about forgiveness, that certain relations are 
pre-supposed as subsisting between God and 
man, relations which make it possible for man 
to sin, and possible for God, not indeed to 
ignore his sin, but in the very act of recog- 
nizing it as all that it is to forgive it, to 
liberate man from it, and to restore him to 
Himself and righteousness. Now if the latent 



36 THE ATONEMENT 

presuppositions of the modern mind are to 
any extent inconsistent with such relations, 
there will be something to overcome before 
the conceptions of forgiveness or atonement 
can get a hearing. These conceptions have 
their place in a certain view of the world as 
a whole, and if the mind is preoccupied 
with a different view, it will have an in- 
stinctive consciousness that it cannot ac- 
commodate them, and a disposition therefore 
to reject them ab initio. This is, in point of 
fact, the difficulty with which we have to deal 
And let no one say that it is transparently 
absurd to suggest that we must get men to 
accept a true philosophy before we can begin 
to preach the gospel to them, as though that 
settled the matter or got over the difficulty. 
We have to take men as we find them; we 
have to preach the gospel to the mind which 
is around us; and if that mind is rooted in 
a view of the world which leaves no room for 
Christ and His work as Christian experience 



AND THE MODERN MIND $7 

has realised them, then that view of the world 
must be appreciated by the evangelist, it must 
be undermined at its weak places, its inade- 
quacy to interpret all that is present even in 
the mind which has accepted it — in other 
words, its inherent inconsistency must be 
demonstrated; the attempt must be made to 
liberate the mind, so that it may be open to the 
impression of realities which under the condi- 
tions supposed it could only encounter with 
instinctive antipathy. It is necessary, there- 
fore, at this point to advert to the various in- 
fluences which have contributed to form the 
mind of our time, and to give it its instinctive 
bias in one direction or another. Powerful 
and legitimate as these influences have been, 
they have nevertheless been in various ways 
partial, and because of their very partiality they 
have, when they absorbed the mind, as new 
modes of thought are apt to do, prejudiced it 
against the consideration of other, possibly of 
deeper and more far-reaching, truths. 



38 THE ATONEMENT 

First, there is the enormous development of 
physical science. This has engrossed human 
intelligence in our own times to an extent 
which can hardly be over-estimated. Far more 
mind has been employed in constructing the 
great fabric of knowledge, which we call 
science, than in any other pursuit of men. 
Far more mind has had its characteristic qual- 
ities and temper imparted to it by scientific 
study than by study in any other field. It is 
of science — which to all intents and purposes 
means physical science — of science and its 
methods and results that the modern mind is 
most confident, and speaks with the most natu- 
ral and legitimate pride. Now science, even in 
this restricted sense, covers a great range of 
subjects ; it may be physics in the narrowest 
meaning of the word, or chemistry, or biologi- 
cal science. The characteristic of our own age 
has been the development of the last, and in 
particular its extension to man. It is impossi- 
ble to dispute the legitimacy of this extension. 



AND THE MODERN MIND 39 

Man has his place in nature; the phenomena 
of life have one of their signal illustrations in 
him, and he is as proper a subject of biological 
study as any other living being. But the in- 
tense preoccupation of much of the most vigor- 
ous intelligence of our time with the biological 
study of man is not without effects upon the 
mind itself, which we need to consider. It 
tends to produce a habit of mind to which cer- 
tain assumptions are natural and inevitable, 
certain other assumptions incredible from the 
first. This habit of mind is in some ways fa- 
vourable to the acceptance of the Atonement 
For example, the biologist's invincible convic- 
tion of the unity of life, and of the certainty 
and power with which whatever touches it at 
one point touches it through and through, is in 
one way entirely favourable. Many of the most 
telling popular objections to the idea of Atone- 
ment rest on an atomic conception of person- 
ality — a conception according to which every 
human being is a closed system, incapable in 



40 THE ATONEMENT 

the last resort of helping or being helped, of 
injuring or being injured, by another. This 
conception has been finally discredited by bi- 
ology, and so far the evangelist must be grate- 
ful. The Atonement presupposes the unity of 
human life, and its solidarity ; it presupposes a 
common and universal responsibility. I believe 
it presupposes also such a conception of the 
unity of man and nature as biology proceeds 
upon ; and in all these respects its physical 
pre-suppositions, if we may so express our- 
selves, are present to the mind of to-day, thanks 
to biology, as they were not even so lately as a 
hundred years ago. 

But this is not all that we have to consider. 
The mind has been influenced by the move- 
ment of physical and even of biological science, 
not only in a way which is favourable, but in 
ways which are prejudicial to the acceptance 
of the Atonement. Every physical science 
seems to have a boundless ambition ; it wants 
to reduce everything to its own level, to explain 



AND THE MODERN MIND 41 

everything in the terms and by the categories 
with which it itself works. The higher has 
always to fight for its life against the lower. 
The physicist would like to reduce chemistry 
to physics ; the chemist has an ambition to 
simplify biology into chemistry; the biologist 
in turn looks with suspicion on anything in 
man which cannot be interpreted biologically. 
He would like to give, and is sometimes ready 
to offer, a biological explanation of self-con- 
sciousness, of freedom, of religion, morality, 
sin. Now a biological explanation, when all is 
done, is a physical explanation, and a physi- 
cal explanation of self-consciousness or the 
moral life is one in which the very essence of 
the thing to be explained is either ignored or 
explained away. Man's life is certainly rooted 
in nature, and therefore a proper subject for 
biological study ; but unless it somehow tran- 
scended nature, and so demanded other than 
physical categories for its complete interpreta- 
tion, there could not be any study or any 



42 THE ATONEMENT 

science at all. If there were nothing but 
matter, as M. Naville has said, there would be 
no materialism ; and if there were nothing but 
life, there would be no biology. Now it is 
in the higher region of human experience, to 
which all physical categories are unequal, that 
we encounter those realities to which the Atone- 
ment is related, and in relation to which it is 
real ; and we must insist upon these higher 
realities, in their specific character, against a 
strong tendency in the scientifically trained 
modern mind, and still more in the general 
mind as influenced by it, to reduce them to 
the merely physical level. 

Take, for instance, the consciousness of sin. 
Evidently the Atonement becomes incredible if 
the consciousness of sin is extinguished or ex- 
plained away. There is nothing for the Atone- 
ment to do ; there is nothing to relate it to ; it 
is as unreal as a rock in the sky. But many 
minds at the present time, under the influence 
of current conceptions in biology, do explain 



AND THE MODERN MIND 43 

it away. All life is one, they argue. It rises 
from the same spring, it runs the same course, 
it comes to the same end. The life of man is 
rooted in nature, and that which beats in my 
veins is an inheritance from an immeasurable 
past. It is absurd to speak of my responsi- 
bility for it, or of my guilt because it manifests 
itself in me, as it inevitably does, in such and 
such forms. There is no doubt that this mode 
of thought is widely prevalent, and that it is 
one of the most serious hindrances to the 
acceptance of the gospel, and especially of the 
Atonement. How are we to appreciate it? 
We must point out, I think, the consequence 
to which it leads. If a man denies that he is 
responsible for the nature which he has in- 
herited — denies responsibility for it on the 
ground that it is inherited — it is a fair ques- 
tion to ask him for what he does accept respon- 
sibility. When he has divested himself of the 
inherited nature, what is left ? The real mean- 
ing of such disowning of responsibility is that 



44 THE ATONEMENT 

a man asserts that his life is a part of the phys- 
ical phenomena of the universe, and nothing 
else ; and he forgets, in the very act of making 
the assertion, that if it were true, it could not 
be so much as made. The merely physical is 
transcended in every such assertion; and the 
man who has transcended it, rooted though 
his life be in nature, and one with the life of 
the whole and of all the past, must take the 
responsibility of living that life out on the high 
level of self-consciousness and morality which 
his very disclaimer involves. The sense of sin 
which wakes spontaneously with the perception 
that he is not what he ought to have been must 
not be explained away ; at the level which life 
has reached in him, this is unscientific as well 
as immoral; his sin — for I do not know 
another word for it — must be realised as all 
that it is in the moral world if he is ever to be 
true to himself, not to say if he is ever to wel- 
come the Atonement, and leave his sin behind. 
We have no need of words like sin and atone- 



AND THE MODERN MIND 45 

ment — we could not have the experiences 
which they designate — unless we had a higher 
than merely natural life; and one of the ten- 
dencies of the modern mind which has to be 
counteracted by the evangelist is the tendency 
induced by physical and especially by biological 
science to explain the realities of personal ex- 
perience by sub-personal categories. In con- 
science, in the sense of personal dignity, in the 
ultimate inability of man to deny the self which 
he is, we have always an appeal against such 
tendencies, which cannot fail ; but it needs to 
be made resolutely when conscience is lethargic 
and the whole bias of the mind is to the other 
side. 

Passing from physical science, the modern 
mind has perhaps been influenced most by 
the great idealist movement in philosophy — ■ 
the movement which in Germany began with 
Kant and culminated in Hegel This ideal- 
ism, just like physical science, gives a certain 
stamp to the mind; when it takes possession 



46 THE ATONEMENT 

of intelligence it casts it, so to speak, into a 
certain mould ; even more than physical science 
it dominates it so that it becomes incapable of 
self-criticism, and very difficult to teach. Its 
importance to the preacher of Christianity is 
that it assumes certain relations between the 
human and the divine, relations which foreclose 
the very questions which the Atonement com- 
pels us to raise. To be brief, it teaches the 
essential unity of God and man. God and 
man, to speak of them as distinct, are neces- 
sary to each other, but man is as necessary 
to God as God is to man. God is the truth 
of man, but man is the reality of God. God 
comes to consciousness of Himself in man, and 
man in being conscious of himself is at the 
same time conscious of God. Though many 
writers of this school make a copious use of 
Christian phraseology, it seems to me obvious 
that it is not in an adequate Christian sense. 
Sin is not regarded as that which ought not to 
be, it is that which is to be transcended. It 



AND THE MODERN MIND 47 

is as inevitable as anything in nature; and the 
sense of it, the bad conscience which accom- 
panies it, is no more than the growing pains 
of the soul. On such a system there is no 
room for atonement in the sense of the media- 
tion of God's forgiveness through Jesus Christ. 
We may consistently speak in it of a man being 
reconciled to himself, or even reconciled to his 
sins, but not, so far as I can understand, of his 
being reconciled to God, and still less, recon- 
ciled to God through the death of His Son. 
The penetration of Kant saw from the first all 
that could be made of atonement on the basis 
of any such system. What it means to the 
speculative mind is that the new man bears 
the sin of the old. When the sinner repents 
and is converted, the weight of what he has 
done comes home to him ; the new man in him 
— the Son of God in him — accepts the re- 
sponsibility of the old man, and so he has peace 
with God. Many whose minds are under the 
influence of this mode of thought do not see 



48 THE ATONEMENT 

clearly to what it leads, and resent criticism of 
it as if it were a sort of impiety. Their philoso- 
phy is to them a surrogate for religion, but they 
should not be allowed to suppose (if they do 
suppose) that it is the equivalent of Chris- 
tianity. There can be no Christianity without 
Christ ; it is the presence of the Mediator which 
makes Christianity what it is. But a unique 
Christ, without Whom our religion disappears, 
is frankly disavowed by the more candid and 
outspoken of our idealist philosophers. Christ, 
they tell us, was certainly a man who had an 
early and a magnificently strong faith in the 
unity of the human and the Divine ; but it was 
faith in a fact which enters into the constitution 
of every human consciousness, and it is absurd 
to suppose that the recognition of the fact, or 
the realisation of it, is essentially dependent on 
Him. He was not sinless — which is an ex- 
pression without meaning, when we think of 
a human being which has to rise by conflict 
and self-suppression out of nature into the 



AND THE MODERN MIND 49 

world of self-consciousness and right and wrong; 
He was not in any sense unique or exceptional ; 
He was only what we all are in our degree ; 
at best, He was only one among many great 
men who have contributed in their place and 
time to the spiritual elevation of the race. 
Such, I say, is the issue of this mode of thought 
as it is frankly avowed by some of its represen- 
tative men ; but the peculiarity of it, when it is 
obscurely fermenting as a leaven in the mind, 
is, that it appeals to men as having special 
affinities to Christianity. In our own country 
it is widely prevalent among those who have 
had a university education, and indeed in a 
much wider circle, and it is a serious question 
how we are to address our gospel to those who 
confront it in such a mental mood. 

I have no wish to be unsympathetic, but I 
must frankly express my conviction that this 
philosophy only lives by ignoring the greatest 
reality of the spiritual world. There is some- 
thing in that world — something with which 



SO THE ATONEMENT 

we can come into intelligible and vital relations 
— something which can evince to our minds 
its truth and reality, for which this philosophy 
can make no room : Christ's consciousness of 
Himself. It is a theory of the universe which 
(on principle) cannot allow Christ to be any- 
thing else than an additional unit in the world's 
population; but if this were the truth about 
Him, no language could be strong enough to 
express the self-delusion in which He lived and 
died. That He was thus self-deluded is a 
hypothesis I do not feel called to discuss. One 
may be accused of subjectivity again, of course, 
though a subjective opinion which has the 
consent of the Christian centuries behind it 
need not tremble at hard names ; but I venture 
to say that there is no reality in the world 
which more inevitably and uncompromisingly 
takes hold of the mind as a reality than our 
Lord's consciousness of Himself as it is attested 
to us in the Gospels. But when we have 
taken this reality for all that it is worth, the 



AND THE MODERN MIND 51 

idealism just described is shaken to the founda- 
tion. What seemed to us so profound a truth 
— the essential unity of the human and the 
divine — may come to seem a formal and de- 
lusive platitude ; in what we once regarded as 
the formula of the perfect religion — the divin- 
ity of man and the humanity of God — we 
may find quite as truly the formula of the first, 
not to say the final, sin. To see Christ not in 
the light of this speculative theorem, but in the 
light of His own consciousness of Himself, is 
to realise not only our kinship to God, but our 
remoteness from Him ; it is to realise our in- 
capacity for self-realisation when we are left to 
ourselves; it is to realise the need of the Me- 
diator if we would come to the Father ; it is to 
realise, in principle, the need of the Atonement, 
the need, and eventually the fact. When the 
modern mind therefore presents itself to us in 
this mood of philosophical competence, judg- 
ing Christ from the point of view of the whole, 
and showing Him His place, we can only in- 



52 THE ATONEMENT 

sist that the place is unequal to His greatness, 
and that His greatness cannot be explained 
away. The mind which is closed to the fact 
of His unique claims, and the unique relation 
to God on which they rest, is closed inevitably 
to the mediation of God's forgiveness through 
His death. 

There is one other modification of mind, 
characteristic of modern times, of which we 
have yet to take account — I mean that 
which is produced by devotion to historical 
study. History is, as much as science, one 
of the achievements of our age ; and the his- 
torical temper is as characteristic of the men 
we meet as the philosophical or the scientific. 
The historical temper, too, is just as apt as 
these others, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps 
quite consciously, but under the engaging plea 
of modesty, to pronounce absolute sentences 
which strike at the life of the Christian reli- 
gion, and especially, therefore, at the idea of 
the Atonement. Sometimes this is done 



AND THE MODERN MIND 53 

broadly, so that every one sees what it means. 
If we are told, for example, that everything 
historical is relative, that it belongs of necessity 
to a time, and is conditioned in ways so intri- 
cate that no knowledge can ever completely 
trace them ; if we are told, further, that for this 
very reason nothing historical can have abso- 
lute significance, or can condition the eternal 
life of man, it is obvious that the Christian 
religion is being cut at the root. It is no use 
speaking about the Atonement — about the 
mediation of God's forgiveness to the soul 
through a historical person and work — if this 
is true. The only thing to be done is to raise 
the question whether it is true. It is no more 
for historical than for physical science to exalt 
itself into a theory of the universe, or to lay 
down the law with speculative absoluteness 
as to the significance and value which shall 
attach to facts. When we face the fact with 
which we are here concerned — the fact of 
Christ's consciousness of Himself and His 



54 THE ATONEMENT 

vocation, to which reference has already been 
made — are we not forced to the conclusion 
that here a new spiritual magnitude has ap- 
peared in history, the very differentia of which 
is that it has eternal significance, and that it 
is eternal life to know it ? If we are to preach 
the Atonement, we cannot allow either history 
or philosophy to proceed on assumptions which 
ignore or degrade the fact of Christ. Only a 
person in whom the eternal has become histori- 
cal can be the bearer of the Atonement, and it 
must be our first concern to show, against all 
assumptions whether made in the name of 
history or of philosophy, that in point of fact 
there is such a person here. 

This consideration requires to be kept in 
view even when we are dealing with the 
modern mind inside the Church. Nothing 
is commoner than to hear those who dissent 
from any given construction of the Atone- 
ment plead for a historical as opposed to a 
dogmatic interpretation of Christ. It is not 



AND THE MODERN MIND 55 

always clear what is meant by this distinc- 
tion, nor is it clear that those who use it are 
always conscious of what it would lead to if it 
were made absolute. Sometimes a dogmatic 
interpretation of the New Testament means 
an interpretation vitiated by dogmatic preju- 
dice, an interpretation in which the meaning 
of the writers is missed because the mind 
is blinded by prepossessions of its own : in 
this sense a dogmatic interpretation is a thing 
which no one would defend. Sometimes, 
however, a dogmatic interpretation is one 
which reveals or discovers in the New Testa- 
ment truths of eternal and divine signifi- 
cance, and to discredit such interpretation in 
the name of the historical is another matter. 
The distinction in this case, as has been al- 
ready pointed out, is not absolute. It is anal- 
ogous to the distinction between fact and 
theory, or between thing and meaning, or be- 
tween efficient cause and final cause. None 
of these distinctions is absolute, and no intel- 



56 THE ATONEMENT 

ligent mind would urge either side in them 
to the disparagement of the other. If we are 
to apprehend the whole reality presented to 
us, we must apprehend the theory as well as 
the fact, the meaning as well as the thing, the 
final as well as the efficient cause. In the 
subject with which we are dealing, this truth 
is frequently ignored. It is assumed, for ex- 
ample, that because Christ was put to death 
by His enemies, or because He died in the 
faithful discharge of His calling, therefore He 
did not die, in the sense of the Atonement, for 
our sins: the historical causes which brought 
about His death are supposed to preclude 
that interpretation of it according to which it 
mediates to us the divine forgiveness. But 
there is no incompatibility between the two 
things. To set aside an interpretation of 
Christ's death as dogmatic, on the ground 
that there is another which is historical, is 
like setting aside the idea that a watch is made 
to measure time because you know it was 



AND THE MODERN MIND 57 

made by a watchmaker. It was both made 
by a watchmaker and made to measure time. 
Similarly it may be quite true both that Christ 
was crucified and slain by wicked men, and 
that He died for our sins. But without enter- 
ing into the questions which this raises as to 
the relation between the wisdom of God and 
the course of human history, it is enough to 
be conscious of the prejudice which the his- 
torical temper is apt to generate against the 
recognition of the eternal in time. Surely it 
is a significant fact that the New Testament 
contains a whole series of books — the Johan- 
nine books — ■ which have as their very burden 
the eternal significance of the historical : eter- 
nal life in Jesus Christ, come in flesh, the pro- 
pitiation for the whole world. Surely also it 
is a significant fact of a different and even an 
ominous kind that we have at present in the 
Church a whole school of critics which is so 
far from appreciating the truth in this that it 
is hardly an exaggeration to say that it has 



58 THE ATONEMENT 

devoted itself to a paltry and peddling criti- 
cism of these books in which the impression 
of the eternal is lost. But whether we are to 
be indebted to John's eyes, or to none but our 
own, if the eternal is not to be seen in Jesus, 
He can have no place in our religion ; if the 
historical has no dogmatic content, it cannot 
be essential to eternal life. Hence if we be- 
lieve and know that we have eternal life in 
Jesus, we must assert the truth which is im- 
plied in this against any conception of history 
which denies it. Nor is it really difficult to 
do so. With the experience of nineteen cen- 
turies behind us, we have only to confront this 
particular historical reality, Jesus Christ, with- 
out prejudice ; in evangelising, we have only 
to confront others with Him; and we shall 
find it still possible to see God in Him, the 
Holy Father who through the Passion of His 
Son ministers to sinners the forgiveness of 
their sins. 

In what has been said thus far by way of 



AND THE MODERN MIND 59 

explaining the modern mind, emphasis may 
seem to have fallen mainly on those charac- 
teristics which make it less accessible than it 
might be to Christian truth, and especially to 
the Atonement. I have tried to point out the 
assailable side of its prepossessions, and to in- 
dicate the fundamental truths which must be 
asserted if our intellectual world is to be one 
in which the gospel may find room. But the 
modern mind has other characteristics. Some 
of these may have been exhibited hitherto 
mainly in criticising current representations 
of the Atonement; but in themselves they 
are entirely legitimate, and the claims they 
put forward are such as we cannot disown. 
Before proceeding to a further statement of 
the Atonement, I shall briefly refer to one or 
two of them : a doctrine of Atonement which 
did not satisfy them would undoubtedly stand 
condemned. 

(1) The modern mind requires that every- 
thing shall be based on experience. Nothing 



60 THE ATONEMENT 

is true or real to it which cannot be experi- 
mentally verified. This we shall all concede. 
But there is an inference sometimes drawn 
from it at which we may look with caution. 
It is the inference that, because everything 
must be based on experience, no appeal to 
Scripture has any authority. I have already 
explained in what sense it is possible to speak 
of the authority of Scripture, and here it is 
only necessary to make the simple remark that 
there is no proper contrast between Scripture 
and experience. Scripture, so far as it con- 
cerns us here, is a record of experience or an 
interpretation of it. It was the Church's ex- 
perience that it had its redemption in Christ; 
it was the interpretation of that experience 
that Christ died for our sins. Yet in empha- 
sising experience the modern mind is right, 
and Scripture would lose its authority if the 
experience it describes were not perpetually 
verified anew. 

(2) The modern mind desires to have every- 



AND THE MODERN MIND 61 

thing in religion ethically construed. As a gen- 
eral principle this must command our unreserved 
assent. Anything which violates ethical stand- 
ards, anything which is immoral or less than 
moral, must be excluded from religion. It may 
be, indeed, that ethical has sometimes been too 
narrowly defined. Ideas have been objected to 
as unethical which are really at variance not 
with a true perception of the constitution of 
humanity, and of the laws which regulate moral 
life, but with an atomic theory of personality 
under which moral life would be impossible. 
Persons are not atoms ; in a sense they inter- 
penetrate, though individuality has been called 
the true impenetrability. The world has been 
so constituted that we do not stand absolutely 
outside of each other; we can do things for 
each other. We can bear each other's burdens, 
and it is not unethical to say so, but the re- 
verse. And again, it need not be unethical, 
though it transcends the ordinary sphere and 
range of ethical action, if we say that God in 



62 THE ATONEMENT 

Christ is able to do for us what we cannot 
do for one another. With reference to the 
Atonement, the demand for ethical treatment 
is usually expressed in two ways, (a) There is 
the demand for analogies to it in human life. 
The demand is justifiable, in so far as God has 
made man in His own image ; but, as has been 
suggested above, it has a limit, in so far as God 
is God and not man, and must have relations 
to the human race which its members do not 
and cannot have to each other, {b) There is 
the demand that the Atonement shall be ex- 
hibited in vital relation to a new life in which 
sin is overcome. This demand also is entirely 
legitimate, and it touches a weak point in the 
traditional Protestant doctrine. Dr. Chalmers 
tells us that he was brought up — such was the 
effect of the current orthodoxy upon him — 
in a certain distrust of good works. Some 
were certainly wanted, but not as being them- 
selves salvation ; only, as he puts it, as tokens 
of justification. It was a distinct stage in his 



AND THE MODERN MIND 63 

religious progress when he realised that true 
justification sanctifies, and that the soul can 
and ought to abandon itself spontaneously 
and joyfully to do the good that it delights 
in. The modern mind assumes what Dr. 
Chalmers painfully discovered. An Atone- 
ment that does not regenerate, it truly holds, 
is not an atonement in which men can be 
asked to believe. Such then, in its pre- 
judices good and bad, is the mind to which 
the great truth of the Christian religion has 
to be presented. 



64 THE ATONEMENT 



CHAPTER II 

SIN AND THE DIVINE REACTION AGAINST IT 

WE have now seen in a general way 
what is meant by the Atonement, 
and what are the characteristics of the mind 
to which the Atonement has to make its ap- 
peal. In that mind there is, as I believe, much 
which falls in with the Atonement, and pre- 
pares a welcome for it; but much also which 
creates prejudice against it, and makes it as 
possible still as in the first century to speak of 
the offence of the cross. No doubt the Atone- 
ment has sometimes been presented in forms 
which provoke antagonism, which challenge 
by an ostentation of unreason, or by a defiance 
of morality, the reason and conscience of man ; 
but this alone does not explain the resentment 
which it often encounters. There is such a 



AND THE MODERN MIND 65 

thing to be found in the world as the man who 
will have nothing to do with Christ on any 
terms, and who will least of all have anything 
to do with Him when Christ presents Himself 
in the character which makes man His debtor 
for ever. All men, as St. Paul says, have not 
faith : it is a melancholy fact, whether we can 
make anything of it or not. Discounting, 
however, this irrational or inexplicable opposi- 
tion, which is not expressed in the mind but 
in the will, how are we to present the Atone- 
ment so that it shall excite the least prejudice, 
and find the most unimpeded access to the 
mind of our own generation ? This is the 
question to which we have now to address 
ourselves. 

To conceive the Atonement, that is, the fact 
that forgiveness is mediated to us through 
Christ, and specifically through His death, as 
clearly and truly as possible, it is necessary for 
us to realise the situation to which it is related. 
We cannot think of it except as related to a 
5 



66 THE ATONEMENT 

given situation. It is determined or condi- 
tioned by certain relations subsisting between 
God and man, as these relations have been 
affected by sin. What we must do, therefore, 
in the first instance, is to make clear to our- 
selves what these relations are, and how sin 
affects them. 

To begin with, they are personal relations ; 
they are relations the truth of which cannot 
be expressed except by the use of personal 
pronouns. We need not ask whether the 
personality of God can be proved antecedent 
to religion, or as a basis for a religion yet to 
be established ; in the only sense in which we 
can be concerned with it, religion is an experi- 
ence of the personality of God, and of our own 
personality in relation to it. ' O Lord, Thou 
hast searched me and known me.' '/am con- 
tinually with Thee'. No human experience 
can be more vital or more normal than that 
which is expressed in these words, and no 
argument, be it ever so subtle or so baffling, 



AND THE MODERN MIND 6 7 

can weigh a feather's weight against such ex- 
perience. The same conception of the rela- 
tions of God and man is expressed again as 
unmistakably in every word of Jesus about the 
Father and the Son and the nature of their 
communion with each other. It is only in 
such personal relations that the kind of situa- 
tion can emerge, and the kind of experience 
be had, with which the Atonement deals ; and 
antecedent to such experience, or in independ- 
ence of it, the Atonement must remain an in- 
credible because an unrealisable thing. 

But to say that the relations of God and 
man are personal is not enough. They are 
not only personal, but universal. Personal is 
habitually used in a certain contrast with legal, 
and it is very easy to lapse into the idea that 
personal relations, because distinct from legal 
ones, are independent of law ; but to say the 
least of it, that is an ambiguous and mislead- 
ing way of describing the facts. The rela- 
tions of God and man are not lawless, they 



68 THE ATONEMENT 

are not capricious, incalculable, incapable of 
moral meaning ; they are personal, but deter- 
mined by something of universal import ; in 
other words, they are not merely personal but 
ethical. That is ethical which is at once 
personal and universal. Perhaps the simplest 
way to make this evident is to notice that 
the relations of man to God are the relations 
to God not of atoms, or of self-contained in- 
dividuals, each of which is a world in itself, 
but of individuals which are essentially related 
to each other, and bound up in the unity of 
a race. The relations of God to man, there- 
fore, are not capricious though they are per- 
sonal: they are reflected or expressed in a 
moral constitution to which all personal be- 
ings are equally bound, a moral constitution 
of eternal and universal validity, which neither 
God nor man can ultimately treat as anything 
else than what it is. 

This is a point at which some prejudice has 
been raised against the Atonement by theolo- 



AND THE MODERN MIND 69 

gians, and more, perhaps, by persons protest- 
ing against what they supposed theologians 
to mean. If one may be excused a personal 
reference, few things have astonished me more 
than to be charged with teaching a ' forensic ' 
or 'legal' or 'judicial' doctrine of Atonement, 
resting, as such a doctrine must do, on a 
' forensic ' or ' legal ' or ' judicial ' conception of 
man's relation to God. It is all the more 
astonishing when the charge is combined with 
what one can only decline as in the circum- 
stances totally unmerited compliments to the 
clearness with which he has expressed himself. 
There is nothing which I should wish to 
reprobate more whole-heartedly than the con- 
ception which is expressed by these words. 
To say that the relations of God and man are 
forensic is to say that they are regulated by 
statute — that sin is a breach of statute — 
that the sinner is a criminal — and that God 
adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute 
in its application to his case. Everybody 



7 o THE ATONEMENT 

knows that this is a travesty of the truth, and it 
is surprising that any one should be charged 
with teaching it, or that any one should 
applaud himself, as though he were in the fore- 
most files of time, for not believing it. It is 
superfluously apparent that the relations of 
God and man are not those of a magistrate on 
the bench pronouncing according to the act on 
the criminal at the bar. To say this, however, 
does not make these relations more intelligible. 
In particular, to say that they are personal, as 
opposed to forensic, does not make them more 
intelligible. If they are to be rational, if they 
are to be moral, if they are to be relations in 
which an ethical life can be lived, and ethical 
responsibilities realised, they must be not only 
personal, but universal ; they must be relations 
that in some sense are determined by law. 
Even to say that they are the relations, not of 
judge and criminal, but of Father and child, 
does not get us past this point. The relations 
of father and child are undoubtedly more ade- 



AND THE MODERN MIND 71 

quate to the truth than those of judge and 
criminal ; they are more adequate, but so far as 
our experience of them goes, they are not equal 
to it. If the sinner is not a criminal before his 
judge, neither is he a naughty child before a 
parent whose own weakness or affinity to evil 
introduces an incalculable element into his 
dealing with his child's fault. I should not 
think of saying that it is the desire to escape 
from the inexorableness of law to a God capa- 
ble of indulgent human tenderness that inspires 
the violent protests so often heard against ' fo- 
rensic ' and ' legal ' ideas : but that is the im- 
pression which one sometimes involuntarily 
receives from them. It ought to be apparent 
to every one that even the relation of parent 
and child, if it is to be a moral relation, must 
be determined in a way which has universal 
and final validity. It must be a relation in 
which — ethically speaking — some things are 
for ever obligatory, and some things for ever 
impossible; in other words, it must be a rela- 



72 THE ATONEMENT 

tion determined by law, and law which cannot 
deny itself. But law in this sense is not ' legal.' 
It is not 'judicial,' or 'forensic,' or 'statutory.' 
None the less it is real and vital, and the whole 
moral value of the relation depends upon it. 
When a man says — as some one has said — 
' There are many to whom the conception of 
forgiveness resting on a judicial transaction 
does not appeal at all,' I entirely agree with 
him; it does not appeal at all to me. But 
what would be the value of a forgiveness which 
did not recognise in its eternal truth and 
worth that universal law in which the relations 
of God and man are constituted ? With- 
out the recognition of that law — that moral 
order or constitution in which we have our life 
in relation to God and each other — righteous- 
ness and sin, atonement and forgiveness, would 
all alike be words without meaning. 

In connection with this, reference may be 
made to an important point in the interpreta- 
tion of the New Testament. The responsibil- 



AND THE MODERN MIND 73 

ity for what is called the forensic conception of 
the Atonement is often traced to St. Paul, and 
the greatest of all the ministers of grace is not 
infrequently spoken of as though he had delib- 
erately laid the most insuperable of stumbling- 
blocks in the way to the gospel. Most people, 
of course, are conscious that they do not look 
well talking down to St. Paul, and occasionally 
one can detect a note of misgiving in the brave 
words in which his doctrine is renounced, a 
note of misgiving which suggests that the 
charitable course is to hear such protests in 
silence, and to let those who utter them think 
over the matter again. But there is what 
claims to be a scientific way of expressing dis- 
sent from the apostle, a way which, equally 
with the petulant one, rests, I am convinced, 
on misapprehension of his teaching. This it 
would not be fair to ignore. It interprets what 
the apostle says about law solely by reference 
to the great question at issue between the 
Jewish and the Christian religions, making the 



74 THE ATONEMENT 

word law mean the statutory system under 
which the Jews lived, and nothing else. No 
one will deny that Paul does use the word in 
this sense; the law often means for him spe- 
cifically the law of Moses. The law of Moses, 
however, never means for him anything less 
than the law of God ; it is one specific form in 
which the universal relations subsisting between 
God and man, and making religion and moral- 
ity possible, have found historical expression. 
But Paul's mind does not rest in this one his- 
torical expression. He generalises it. He has 
the conception of a universal law, to which he 
can appeal in Gentile as well as in Jew — a law 
in the presence of which sin is revealed, and by 
the reaction of which sin is judged — a law 
which God could not deny without denying 
Himself, and to which justice is done (in other 
words, which is maintained in its integrity), 
even when God justifies the ungodly. But 
when law is thus universalised, it ceases to be 
legal ; it is not a statute, but the moral consti- 



AND THE MODERN MIND 75 

tution of the world. Paul preached the same 
gospel to the Gentiles as he did to the Jews ; he 
preached in it the same relation of the Atone- 
ment and of Christ's death to divine law. But 
he did not do this by extending to all mankind 
a Pharisaic, legal, forensic relation to God: he 
did it by rising above such conceptions, even 
though as a Pharisee he may have had to start 
from them, to the conception of a relation of 
all men to God expressing itself in a moral con- 
stitution — or, as he would have said, but in an 
entirely unforensic sense, in a law — of divine 
and unchanging validity. The maintenance of 
this law, or of this moral constitution, in its in- 
violable integrity was the signature of the for- 
giveness Paul preached. The Atonement meant 
to him that forgiveness was mediated through 
One in whose life and death the most signal 
homage was paid to this law : the very glory of 
the Atonement was that it manifested the right- 
eousness of God; it demonstrated God's con- 
sistency with His own character, which would 



76 THE ATONEMENT 

have been violated alike by indifference to 
sinners and by indifference to that universal 
moral order — that law of God — in which 
alone eternal life is possible. 

Hence it is a mistake to say — though this 
also has been said — that 'Paul's problem was 
not that of the possibility of forgiveness ; it 
was the Jewish law, the Old Testament dis- 
pensation: how to justify his breach with it, 
how to demonstrate that the old order had 
been annulled and a new order inaugurated.' 
There is a false contrast in all such proposi- 
tions. Paul's problem was that of the Jewish 
law, and it was also that of the possibility of 
forgiveness ; it was that of the Jewish law, and 
it was also that of a revelation of grace, in 
which God should justify the ungodly, Jew or 
Gentile, and yet maintain inviolate those uni- 
versal moral relations between Himself and 
man for which law is the compendious ex- 
pression. It does not matter whether we sup- 
pose him to start from the concrete instance of 



AND THE MODERN MIND J7 

the Jewish law, and to generalise on the basis 
of it ; or to start from the universal conception 
of law, and to recognise in existing Jewish 
institutions the most available and definite 
illustration of it : in either case, the only Paul 
whose mind is known to us has completely 
transcended the forensic point of view. The 
same false contrast is repeated when we are 
told that, ' That doctrine (Paul's " juristic doc- 
trine ") had its origin, not so much in his re- 
ligious experience, as in apologetic necessities.' 
The only apologetic necessities which give rise 
to fundamental doctrines are those created 
by religious experience. The apologetic of 
any religious experience is just the definition 
of it as real in relation to other acknowledged 
realities. Paul had undoubtedly an apologetic 
of forgiveness — namely, his doctrine of atone- 
ment. But the acknowledged reality in rela- 
tion to which he defined forgiveness — the 
reality with which, by means of his doctrine 
of atonement, he showed forgiveness to be 



78 THE ATONEMENT 

consistent — was not the law of the Jews 
(though that was included in it, or might be 
pointed to in illustration of it) : it was the law 
of God, the universal and inviolable order in 
which alone eternal life is possible, and in 
which all men, and not the Jews only, live and 
move and have their being. It was the per- 
ception of this which made Paul an apostle to 
the Gentiles, and it is this very thing itself, 
which some would degrade into an awkward, 
unintelligent, and outworn rag of Pharisaic 
apologetic, which is the very heart and soul 
of Paul's Gentile gospel. Paul himself was 
perfectly conscious of this ; he could not have 
preached to the Gentiles at all unless he had 
been. But there is nothing in it which can be 
characterised as ' legal,' 'judicial,' or ' forensic ' ; 
and of this also, I have no doubt, the apostle 
was well aware. Of course he occupied a 
certain historical position, had certain histori- 
cal questions to answer, was subject to his- 
torical limitations of different kinds; but I 



AND THE MODERN MIND 79 

have not the courage to treat him, nor do his 
words entitle any one to do so, as a man who 
in the region of ideas could not put two and 
two together. 

But to return to the point from which this 
digression on St. Paul started. We have seen 
that the relations of God and man are per- 
sonal, and also that they are universal, that is, 
there is a law of them, or, if we like to say so, 
a law in them, on the maintenance of which 
their whole ethical value depends. The next 
point to be noticed is that these relations are 
deranged or disordered by sin. Sin is, in fact, 
nothing else than this derangement or disturb- 
ance : it is that in which wrong is done to the 
moral constitution under which we live. And 
let no one say that in such an expression we 
are turning our back on the personal world, 
and lapsing, or incurring the risk of lapsing, 
into mere legalism again. It cannot be too 
often repeated that if the universal element, 
or law, be eliminated from personal relations, 



80 THE ATONEMENT 

there is nothing intelligible left : no reason, no 
morality, no religion, no sin or righteousness 
or forgiveness, nothing to appeal to mind or 
conscience. In the widest sense of the word, 
sin, as a disturbance of the personal relations 
between God and man, is a violence done to 
the constitution under which God and man 
form one moral community, share, as we may 
reverently express it, one life, have in view the 
same moral ends. 

It is no more necessary in connection with 
the Atonement than in any other connection 
that we should have a doctrine of the origin 
of sin. We do not know its origin, we only 
know that it is here. We cannot observe the 
genesis of the bad conscience any more than 
we can observe the genesis of consciousness 
in general. We see that consciousness does 
stand in relief against the background of natu- 
ral life ; but though we believe that, as it exists 
in us, it has emerged from that background, 
we cannot see it emerge ; it is an ultimate 



AND THE MODERN MIND 81 

fact, and is assumed in all that we can ever 
regard as its physical antecedents and pre- 
suppositions. In the same way, the moral 
consciousness is an ultimate fact, and irre- 
ducible. The physical theory of evolution 
must not be allowed to mislead us here, and 
in particular it must not be allowed to dis- 
credit the conception of moral responsibility 
for sin which is embodied in the story of the 
Fall. Each of us individually has risen into 
moral life from a mode of being which was 
purely natural ; in other words, each of us, 
individually, has been a subject of evolution ; 
but each of us also has fallen — fallen, pre- 
sumably, in ways determined by his natural 
constitution, yet certainly, as conscience as- 
sures us, in ways for which we are morally 
answerable, and to which, in the moral con- 
stitution of the world, consequences attach 
which we must recognise as our due. They 
are not only results of our action, but results 
which that action has merited, and there is no 

6 



82 THE ATONEMENT 

moral hope for us unless we accept them as 
such. Now what is true of any, or rather of 
all, of us, without compromise of the moral 
consciousness, may be true of the race, or of 
the first man, if there was a first man. Evo- 
lution and a Fall cannot be inconsistent, for 
both enter into every moral experience of 
which we know anything; and no opinion 
we hold about the origin of sin can make 
it anything else than it is in conscience, or 
give its results any character other than that 
which they have to conscience. Of course 
when one tries to interpret sin outside of 
conscience, as though it were purely physi- 
cal, and did not have its being in person- 
ality, consciousness, and will, it disappears; 
and the laborious sophistries of such interpre- 
tations must be left to themselves. The point 
for us is that no matter how sin originated, 
in the moral consciousness in which it has 
its being it is recognised as a derangement of 
the vital relations of man, a violation of that 



AND THE MODERN MIND 83 

universal order outside of which he has no 
true good. 

In what way, now, let us ask, does the reality 
of sin come home to the sinner ? How does 
he recognise it as what it is ? What is the re- 
action against the sinner, in the moral order 
under which he lives, which reveals to him the 
meaning of his sinful act or state ? 

In the first place, there is that instantaneous 
but abiding reaction which is called the bad 
conscience — the sense of guilt, of being an- 
swerable to God for sin. The sin may be an 
act which is committed in a moment, but in 
this aspect of it, at least, it does not fade into 
the past. An animal may have a past, for 
anything we can tell, and naturalistic interpre- 
ters of sin may believe that sin dies a natural 
death with time, and need not trouble us per- 
manently ; but this is not the voice of conscience, 
in which alone sin exists, and which alone can 
tell us the truth about it. The truth is that 
the spiritual being has no past. Just as he is 



84 THE ATONEMENT 

continually with God, his sin is continually 
with him. He cannot escape it by not think- 
ing. When he keeps silence, as the Psalmist 
says — and that is always his first resource, as 
though, if he were to say nothing about it, God 
might say nothing about it, and the whole thing 
blow over — it devours him like a fever within: 
his bones wax old with his moaning all day 
long. This sense of being wrong with God, 
under His displeasure, excluded from His 
fellowship, afraid to meet Him yet bound to 
meet Him, is the sense of guilt. Conscience 
confesses in it its liability to God, a liability 
which in the very nature of the case it can do 
nothing to meet, and which therefore is nearly 
akin to despair. 

But the bad conscience, real as it is, may be 
too abstractly interpreted. Man is not a pure 
spirit, but a spiritual being whose roots strike 
to the very depths of nature, and who is con- 
nected by the most intimate and vital relations 
not only with his fellow-creatures of the same 



AND THE MODERN MIND 85 

species, but with the whole system of nature in 
which he lives. The moral constitution in which 
he has his being comprehends, if we may say so, 
nature in itself: the God who has established 
the moral order in which man lives, has estab- 
lished the natural order also as part of the same 
whole with it. In some profound way the two 
are one. We distinguish in man, legitimately 
enough, between the spiritual and the physical ; 
but man is one, and the universe in which he lives 
is one, and in man's relation to God the distinc- 
tion of physical and spiritual must ultimately 
disappear. The sin which introduces disorder 
into man's relations to God produces reactions 
affecting man as a whole — not reactions that, 
as we sometimes say, are purely spiritual, but 
reactions as broad as man's being and as the 
whole divinely constituted environment in which 
it lives. I am well aware of the difficulty of 
giving expression to this truth, and of the hope- 
lessness of trying to give expression to it by 
means of those very distinctions which it is 



86 THE ATONEMENT 

its nature to transcend. The distinctions are 
easy and obvious; what we have to learn is 
that they are not final. It seems so conclusive 
to say, as some one has done in criticising 
the idea of atonement, that spiritual transgress- 
ing brings spiritual penalty, and physical brings 
physical; it seems so conclusive, and it is in 
truth so completely beside the mark. We can- 
not divide either man or the universe in this 
fashion into two parts which move on different 
planes and have no vital relations; we cannot, 
to apply this truth to the subject before us, 
limit the divine reaction against sin, or the 
experiences through which, in any case what- 
ever sin is brought home to man as what it is, 
to the purely spiritual sphere. Every sin is a 
sin of the indivisible human being, and the 
divine reaction against it expresses itself to con- 
science through the indivisible frame of that 
world, at once natural and spiritual, in which 
man lives. We cannot distribute evils into the 
two classes of physical and moral, and subse- 



AND THE MODERN MIND 87 

quently investigate the relation between them : 
if we could, it would be of no service here. 
What we have to understand is that when a 
man sins he does something in which his whole 
being participates, and that the reaction of God 
against his sin is a reaction in which he is con- 
scious, or might be conscious, that the whole 
system of things is in arms against him. 

There are those, no doubt, to whom this will 
seem fantastic, but it is a truth, I am convinced, 
which is presupposed in the Christian doctrine 
of Atonement, as the mediation of forgiveness 
through the suffering and death of Christ : 
and it is a truth also, if I am not much mis- 
taken, to which all the highest poetry, which 
is also the deepest vision of the human mind, 
bears witness. We may distinguish natural 
law and moral law as sharply as we please, and 
it is as necessary sometimes as it is easy to 
make these sharp and absolute distinctions ; but 
there is a unity in experience which makes 
itself felt deeper than all the antitheses of 



88 THE ATONEMENT 

logic, and in that unity nature and spirit are 
no more defined by contrast with each other: 
on the contrary, they interpenetrate and sup- 
port each other : they are aspects of the same 
whole. When we read in the prophet Amos, 
' Lo, He that . formeth the mountains, and 
createth the wind, and declareth unto man 
what is his thought, that maketh the morning 
darkness and treadeth upon the high places 
of the earth, the Lord, the God of hosts, is 
His name,' this is the truth which is expressed. 
The power which reveals itself in conscience 
— telling us all things that ever we did, 
declaring unto us what is our thought — is 
the same which reveals itself in nature, es- 
tablishing the everlasting hills, creating the 
winds which sweep over them, turning the 
shadow of death into the morning and mak- 
ing the day dark with night, calling for the 
waters of the sea, and pouring them out on 
the face of the earth. Conscience speaks in 
a still small voice, but it is no impotent voice ; 



AND THE MODERN MIND 89 

it can summon the thunder to give it reso- 
nance ; the power which we sometimes speak 
of as if it were purely spiritual is a power 
which clothes itself spontaneously and of right 
in all the majesty and omnipotence of nature. 
It is the same truth, again, in another aspect 
of it, which is expressed in Wordsworth's sub- 
lime lines to Duty: 

' Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong, 
And the most ancient Heavens through Thee are fresh and 
strong.' 

When the mind sees deepest, it is conscious 
that it needs more than physical astronomy, 
more than spectrum analysis, to tell us every- 
thing even about the stars. There is a moral 
constitution, it assures us, even of the physi- 
cal world ; and though it is impossible for us 
to work it out in detail, the assumption of 
it is the only assumption on which we can 
understand the life of a being related as 
man is related both to the natural and the 
spiritual. I do not pretend to prove that 



90 THE ATONEMENT 

there is articulate or conscious reflection on 
this in either the Old Testament or the New ; 
I take it for granted, as self-evident, that this 
sense of the ultimate unity of the natural and 
the spiritual — which is, indeed, but one form 
of belief in God — pervades the Bible from 
beginning to end. It knows nothing of our 
abstract and absolute distinctions; to come to 
the matter in hand, it knows nothing of a 
sin which has merely spiritual penalties. Sin 
is the act or the state of man, and the reaction 
against it is the reaction of the whole order, 
at once natural and spiritual, in which man 
lives. 

Now the great difficulty which the modern 
mind has with the Atonement, or with the 
representation of it in the New Testament, is 
that it assumes some kind of connection be- 
tween sin and death. Forgiveness is mediated 
through Christ, but specifically through His 
death. He died for our sins ; if we can be put 
right with God apart from this, then, St. Paul 



AND THE MODERN MIND 91 

tells us, He died for nothing. One is almost 
ashamed to repeat that this is not Paulinism, 
but the Christianity of the whole Apostolic 
Church. What St. Paul made the basis of his 
preaching, that Christ died for our sins, accord- 
ing to the Scriptures, he had on his own show- 
ing received as the common Christian tradition. 
But is there anything in it? Can we receive 
it simply on the authority of the primitive 
Church ? Can we realise any such connection 
between death and sin as makes it a truth to 
us, an intelligible, impressive, overpowering 
thought, that Christ died for our sins ? 

I venture to say that a great part of the 
difficulty which is felt at this point is due to 
the false abstraction just referred to. Sin is 
put into one world — the moral ; death is put 
into another world — the natural ; and there 
is no connection between them. This is very 
convincing if we find it possible to believe that 
we live in two unconnected worlds. But if we 
find it impossible to believe this — and surely 



92 THE ATONEMENT 

the impossibility is patent — its plausibility is 
gone. It is a shining example of this false 
abstraction when we are told, as though it 
were a conclusive objection to all that the New 
Testament has to say about the relation of sin 
and death, that ' the specific penalty of sin is 
not a fact of the natural life, but of the moral 
life.' What right has any one, in speaking of 
the ultimate realities in human life, of those 
experiences in which man becomes conscious 
of all that is involved in his relations to God 
and their disturbance by sin, to split that hu- 
man life into 'natural' and 'moral,' and fix 
an impassable gulf between? The distinction 
is legitimate, as has already been remarked, 
within limits, but it is not final ; and what 
the New Testament teaches, or rather assumes, 
about the relation of sin and death, is one of 
the ways in which we are made sensible that it 
is not final. Sin and death do not belong to 
unrelated worlds. As far as man is concerned 
the two worlds, to use an inadequate figure, 



AND THE MODERN MIND 93 

intersect; and at one point in the line of their 
intersection sin and death meet and interpene- 
trate. In the indivisible experience of man he 
is conscious that they are parts or aspects of 
the same thing. 

That this is what Scripture means when it 
assumes the connection of death and sin is 
not to be refuted by pointing either to the 
third chapter of Genesis or to the fifth of 
Romans. It does not, for example, do justice 
either to Genesis or to St. Paul to say, as has 
been said, that according to their representa- 
tion, ' Death — not spiritual, but natural death 
— is the direct consequence of sin and its 
specific penalty.' In such a dictum, the dis- 
tinctions again mislead. To read the third 
chapter of Genesis in this sense would mean 
that what we had to find in it was a mytho- 
logical explanation of the origin of physical 
death. But does any one believe that any 
Bible writer was ever curious about this ques- 
tion? or does any one believe that a mytho- 



94 THE ATONEMENT 

logical solution of the problem, how death 
originated — a solution which ex hypothesi has 
not a particle of truth or even of meaning in 
it — could have furnished the presupposition 
for the fundamental doctrine of the Christian 
religion, that Christ died for our sins, and that 
in Him we have our forgiveness through His 
blood ? A truth which has appealed so power- 
fully to man cannot be sustained on a false- 
hood. That the third chapter of Genesis is 
mythological in form, no one who knows what 
mythology is will deny; but even mythology 
is not made out of nothing, and in this chapter 
every atom is ' stuff o' the conscience.' What 
we see in it is conscience, projecting as it were 
in a picture on a screen its own invincible, 
dear-bought, despairing conviction that sin and 
death are indissolubly united — that from death 
the sinful race can never get away — that it is 
part of the indivisible reality of sin that the 
shadow of death darkens the path of the sin- 
ner, and at last swallows him up. It is this 



AND THE MODERN MIND 95 

also which is in the mind of St. Paul when he 
says that by one man sin entered into the 
world and death by sin. It is not the origin 
of death he is interested in, nor the origin of 
sin either, but the fact that sin and death hang 
together. And just because sin is sin, this is 
not a fact of natural history, or a fact which 
natural history can discredit. Scripture has 
no interest in natural history, nor does such 
an interest help us to understand it. It is 
no doubt perfectly true that to the biologist 
death is part of the indispensable machinery of 
nature ; it is a piece of the mechanism with- 
out which the movement of the whole would 
be arrested ; to put it so, death to the biolo- 
gist is part of the same whole as life, or life 
and death are for him aspects of one thing. 
One can admit this frankly without com- 
promising, because without touching, the other 
and deeper truth which is so interesting and 
indeed so vital alike in the opening pages of 
revelation and in its consummation in the 



96 THE ATONEMENT 

Atonement. The biologist, when he deals 
with man, and with his life and death, deliber- 
ately deals with them in abstraction, as merely 
physical phenomena ; to him man is a piece 
of nature, and he is nothing more. But the 
Biblical writers deal with man in the integrity 
of his being, and in his relations to God ; they 
transcend the distinction of natural and moral, 
because for God it is not final : they are sen- 
sible of the unity in things which the every-day 
mind, for practical purposes, finds it convenient 
to keep apart. It is one great instance of this 
that they are sensible of the unity of sin and 
death. We may call sin a spiritual thing, but 
the man who has never felt the shadow of 
death fall upon it does not know what that 
spiritual thing is : and we may call death a 
natural thing, but the man who has not felt 
its natural pathos deepen into tragedy as he 
faced it with the sense of sin upon him does 
not know what that natural thing is. We 
are here, in short, at the vanishing point of 



AND THE MODERN MIND 97 

this distinction — God is present, and nature 
and spirit interpenetrate in His presence. 
We hear much in other connections of the 
sacramental principle, and its importance for 
the religious interpretation of nature. It is a 
sombre illustration of this principle if we say 
that death is a kind of sacrament of sin. It 
is in death, ultimately, that the whole meaning 
of sin comes home to the sinner ; he has not 
sounded it to its depths till he has discovered 
that this comes into it at last. And we must 
not suppose that when Paul read the third 
chapter of Genesis he read it as a mytholog- 
ical explanation of the origin of physical 
death, and accepted it as such on the author- 
ity of inspiration. With all his reverence for 
the Old Testament, Paul accepted nothing 
from it that did not speak to his conscience, 
and waken echoes there; and what so spoke 
to him from the third chapter of Genesis was 
not a mythical story of how death invaded 
Paradise, but the profound experience of the 



98 THE ATONEMENT 

human race expressed in the story, an experi- 
ence in which sin and death interpenetrate, 
interpret, and in a sense constitute each other. 
To us they are what they are only in rela- 
tion to each other, and when we deny the 
relation we see the reality of neither. This 
is the truth, as I apprehend it, of all we are 
taught either in the Old. Testament or in the 
New about the relation of sin and death. It 
is part of the greater truth that what we call 
the physical and spiritual worlds are ultimately 
one, being constituted with a view to each 
other; and most of the objections which are 
raised against it are special cases of the objec- 
tions which are raised against the recognition 
of this ultimate unity. So far as they are 
such, it is not necessary to discuss them fur- 
ther; and so far as the ultimate unity of the 
natural and the spiritual is a truth rather to 
be experienced than demonstrated it is not 
probable that much can be done by argu- 
ment to gain acceptance for the idea that 



AND THE MODERN MIND 99 

sin and death have essential relations to each 
other. But there are particular objections to 
this idea to which it may be worth while to 
refer. 

There is, to begin with, the undoubted 
fact that many people live and die without, 
consciously at least, recognising this relation. 
The thought of death may have had a very 
small place in their lives, and when death 
itself comes it may, for various reasons, be a 
very insignificant experience to them. It may 
come in a moment, suddenly, and give no time 
for feeling; or it may come as the last step 
in a natural process of decay, and arrest life 
almost unconsciously ; or it may come through 
a weakness in which the mind wanders to 
familiar scenes of the past, living these over 
again, and in a manner escaping by so doing 
the awful experience of death itself ; or it may 
come in childhood before the moral conscious- 
ness is fully awakened, and moral reflection and 
experience possible. This last case, properly 

L.ofC. 



ioo THE ATONEMENT 

speaking, does not concern us; we do not 
know how to define sin in relation to those 
in whom the moral consciousness is as yet 
undeveloped: we only know that somehow or 
other they are involved in the moral as well 
as in the natural unity of the race. But leav- 
ing them out of account, is there any real 
difficulty in the others ? any real objection to 
the Biblical idea that sin and death in human- 
ity are essentially related? I do not think 
there is. To say that many people are uncon- 
scious of the connection is only another way 
of saying that many people fail to realise in 
full and tragic reality what is meant by death 
and sin. They think very little about either. 
The third chapter of Genesis could never have 
been written out of their conscience. Sin is 
not for them all one with despair : they are 
not, through fear of death, all their lifetime 
subject to bondage. Scripture, of course, has 
no difficulty in admitting this; it depicts, on 
the amplest scale, and in the most vivid col- 



AND THE MODERN MIND 101 

ours, the very kind of life and death which 
are here supposed. But it does not consider 
that such a life and death are ipso facto a 
refutation of the truth it teaches about the 
essential relations of death and sin. On the 
contrary, it considers them a striking demon- 
stration of that moral dulness and insensibility 
in man which must be overcome if he is ever 
to see and feel his sin as what it is to God, 
or welcome the Atonement as that in which 
God's forgiveness of sin is mediated through 
the tremendous experience of death. I know 
there are those who will call this arrogant or 
even insolent, as though I were passing a 
moral sentence on all who do not accept a 
theorem of mine ; but I hope I do not need 
here to disclaim any such unchristian temper. 
Only, it is necessary to insist that the connec- 
tion of sin and death in Scripture is neither 
a fantastic piece of mythology, explaining, as 
mythology does, the origin of a physical law, 
nor, on the other hand, a piece of super- 



102 THE ATONEMENT 

naturally revealed history, to be accepted on 
the authority of Him who has revealed it; 
in such revelations no one believes any longer ; 
it is a profound conviction and experience of 
the human conscience, and all that is of in- 
terest is to show that such a conviction and 
experience can never be set aside by the 
protest of those who aver that they know 
nothing about it. One must insist on this, 
however it may expose him to the charge of 
judging. Can we utter any truth at all, in 
which conscience is concerned, and which is 
not universally acknowledged, without seem- 
ing to judge? 

Sometimes, apart from the general denial of 
any connection between death and sin, it is 
pointed out that death has another and a to- 
tally different character. Death in any given 
case may be so far from coming as a judgment 
of God, that it actually comes as a gracious 
gift from Him ; it may even be an answer to 
prayer, a merciful deliverance from pain, an 



AND THE MODERN MIND 103 

event welcomed by suffering human nature, 
and by all who sympathise with it. This is 
quite true, but again, one must point out, rests 
on the false abstraction so often referred to. 
Man is regarded in all this simply in the 
character of a sufferer, and death as that which 
brings suffering to an end ; but that is not all 
the truth about man, nor all the truth about 
death. Physical pain may be so terrible that 
consciousness is absorbed and exhausted in it, 
sometimes even extinguished, but it is not to 
such abnormal conditions we should appeal to 
discover the deepest truths in the moral con- 
sciousness of man. If the waves of pain sub- 
sided, and the whole nature collected its forces 
again, and conscience was once more audible, 
death too would be seen in a different light. 
It might not indeed be apprehended at once, 
as Scripture apprehends it, but it would not 
be regarded simply as a welcome relief from 
pain. It would become possible to see in it 
something through which God spoke to the 



104 THE ATONEMENT 

conscience, and eventually to realise its inti- 
mate relation to sin. 

The objections we have just considered are 
not very serious, because they practically mean 
that death has no moral character at all ; they 
reduce it to a natural phenomenon, and do 
not bring it into any relation to the con- 
science. It is a more respectable, and per- 
haps a more formidable objection, when death 
is brought into the moral world, and when the 
plea is put forward that so far from being 
God's judgment upon sin, it may be itself a 
high moral achievement. A man may die 
greatly; his death may be a triumph; noth- 
ing in his life may become him like the leav- 
ing it. Is not this inconsistent with the idea 
that there is any peculiar connection between 
death and sin? From the Biblical point of 
view the answer must again be in the negative. 
There is no such triumph over death as makes 
death itself a noble ethical achievement, which 
is not at the same time a triumph over sin. 



AND THE MODERN MIND 105 

Man vanquishes the one only as in the grace 
of God he is able to vanquish the other. The 
doom that is in death passes away only as the 
sin to which it is related is transcended. But 
there is more than this to be said. Death can- 
not be so completely an action that it ceases 
to be a passion ; it cannot be so completely 
achieved that it ceases to be accepted or en- 
dured. And in this last aspect of it the origi- 
nal character which it bore in relation to sin 
still makes itself felt. Transfigure it, as it 
may be transfigured, by courage, by devotion, 
by voluntary abandonment of life for a higher 
good, and it remains nevertheless the last 
enemy. There is something in it monstrous 
and alien to the spirit, something which baffles 
the moral intelligence, till the truth dawns 
upon us that for all our race sin and death 
are aspects of one thing. If we separate them, 
we understand neither ; nor do we understand 
the solemn greatness of martyrdom itself if we 
regard it as a triumph only, and eliminate from 



106 THE ATONEMENT 

the death which martyrs die all sense of the 
universal relation in humanity of death and 
sin. No one knew the spirit of the martyr 
more thoroughly than St. Paul. No one could 
speak more confidently and triumphantly of 
death than he. No one knew better how to 
turn the passion into action, the endurance 
into a great spiritual achievement. But also, 
no one knew better than he, in consistency 
with all this, that sin and death are needed 
for the interpretation of each other, and that 
fundamentally, in the experience of the race, 
they constitute one whole. Even when he 
cried, ' O death, where is thy sting ? ' he was 
conscious that 'the sting of death is sin.' 
Each, so to speak, had its reality in the other. 
No one could vanquish death who had not 
vanquished sin. No one could know what sin 
meant without tasting death. These were not 
mythological fancies in St. Paul's mind, but 
the conviction in which the Christian con- 
science experimentally lived, and moved, and 



AND THE MODERN MIND 107 

had its being. And these convictions, I re- 
peat, furnish the point of view from which we 
must appreciate the Atonement, i.e. the truth 
that forgiveness, as Christianity preaches it, is 
specifically mediated through Christ's death. 



io8 THE ATONEMENT 



CHAPTER III 

CHRIST AND MAN IN THE ATONEMENT 

WHAT has now been said about the 
relations subsisting between God and 
man, about the manner in which these relations 
are affected by sin, and particularly about the 
Scripture doctrine of the connection between 
sin and death, must determine, to a great 
extent, our attitude to the Atonement. The 
Atonement, as the New Testament presents 
it, assumes the connection of sin and death. 
Apart from some sense and recognition of 
such connection, the mediation of forgiveness 
through the death of Christ can only appear 
an arbitrary, irrational, unacceptable idea. But 
leaving the Atonement meanwhile out of sight, 
and looking only at the situation created by 



AND THE MODERN MIND 109 

sin, the question inevitably arises, What can 
be done with it ? Is it possible to remedy or 
to reverse it ? It is an abnormal and unnatural 
situation ; can it be annulled, and the relations 
of God and man put upon an ideal footing? 
Can God forgive sin and restore the soul? 
Can we claim that He shall ? And if it is 
possible for Him to do so, can we tell how or 
on what conditions it is possible ? 

When the human mind is left to itself, there 
are only two answers which it can give to these 
questions. Perhaps they are not specially char- 
acteristic of the modern mind, but the modern 
mind in various moods has given passionate 
expression to both of them. The first says 
roundly that forgiveness is impossible. Sin is, 
and it abides. The sinner can never escape 
from the past. His future is mortgaged to it, 
and it cannot be redeemed. He can never get 
back the years which the locust has eaten. 
His leprous flesh can never come again like the 
flesh of a little child. Whatsoever a man 



no THE ATONEMENT 

soweth, that shall he also reap, and reap for 
ever and ever. It is not eternal punishment 
which is incredible ; nothing else has credi- 
bility. Let there be no illusion about this: 
forgiveness is a violation, a reversal, of law, 
and no such thing is conceivable in a world 
in which law reigns. 

The answer to this is, that sin and its conse- 
quences are here conceived as though they 
belonged to a purely physical world, whereas, 
if the world were only physical, there could be 
no such thing as sin. As soon as we realise 
that sin belongs to a world in which freedom is 
real — a world in which reality means the per- 
sonal relations subsisting between man and 
God, and the experiences realised in these 
relations — the question assumes a different 
aspect. It is not one of logic or of physical 
law, but of personality, of character, of freedom. 
There is at least a possibility that the sinner's 
relation to his sin and Gods relation to the 
sinner should change, and that out of these 



AND THE MODERN MIND in 

changed relations a regenerative power should 
spring, making the sinner, after all, a new 
creature. The question, of course, is not de- 
cided in this sense, but it is not foreclosed. 

At the opposite extreme from those who 
pronounce forgiveness impossible stand those 
who give the second answer to the great ques- 
tion, and calmly assure us that forgiveness may 
be taken for granted. They emphasise what 
the others overlooked — the personal character 
of the relations of God and man. God is a 
loving Father; man is His weak and unhappy 
child ; and of course God forgives. As Heine 
put it, cest mon metier, it is what He is for. 
But the conscience which is really burdened 
by sin does not easily find satisfaction in this 
cheap pardon. There is something in con- 
science which will not allow it to believe that 
God can simply condone sin : to take forgive- 
ness for granted, when you realise what you 
are doing, seems to a live conscience impious 
and profane. In reality, the tendency to take 



H2 THE ATONEMENT 

forgiveness for granted is the tendency of those 
who, while they properly emphasise the per- 
sonal character of the relations of God and 
man, overlook their universal character — that 
is, exclude from them that element of law with- 
out which personal relations cease to be ethical. 
But a forgiveness which ignores this stands 
in no relation to the needs of the soul or the 
character of God. 

What the Christian religion holds to be the 
truth about forgiveness — a truth embodied in 
the Atonement — is something quite distinct 
from both the propositions which have just 
been considered. The New Testament does 
not teach, with the naturalistic or the legal 
mind, that forgiveness is impossible; neither 
does it teach, with the sentimental or lawless 
mind, that it may be taken for granted. It 
teaches that forgiveness is mediated to sinners 
through Christ, and specifically through His 
death : in other words, that it is possible for 
God to forgive, but possible for God only through 



AND THE MODERN MIND 113 

a supreme revelation of His love, made at 
infinite cost, and doing justice to the uttermost 
to those inviolable relations in which alone, as 
I have already said, man can participate in 
eternal life, the life of God Himself — doing 
justice to them as relations in which there is 
an inexorable divine reaction against sin, finally 
expressing itself in death. It is possible on 
these terms, and it becomes actual as sinful 
men open their hearts in penitence and faith 
to this marvellous revelation, and abandon their 
sinful life unreservedly to the love of God in 
Christ who died for them. 

From this point of view it seems to me 
possible to present in a convincing and per- 
suasive light some of the truths involved in 
the Atonement to which the modern mind is 
supposed to be specially averse. 

Thus it becomes credible — we say so not 
a priori, but after experience — that there is 
a divine necessity for it; in other words, there 
is no forgiveness possible to God without it: 



ii4 THE ATONEMENT 

if He forgives at all, it must be in this way 
and in no other. To say so beforehand would 
be inconceivably presumptuous, but it is quite 
another thing to say so after the event. What 
it really means is that in the very act of forgiv- 
ing sin — or, to use the daring word of St. Paul, 
in the very act of justifying the ungodly — God 
must act in consistency with His whole charac- 
ter. He must demonstrate Himself to be what 
He is in relation to sin, a God with whom evil 
cannot dwell, a God who maintains inviolate 
the moral constitution of the world, taking sin 
as all that it is in the very process through 
which He mediates His forgiveness to men. 

It is the recognition of this divine neces- 
sity — not to forgive, but to forgive in a way 
which shows that God is irreconcilable to evil, 
and can never treat it as other or less than it is 
— it is the recognition of this divine necessity, 
or the failure to recognize it, which ultimately 
divides interpreters of Christianity into evan- 
gelical and non-evangelical, those who are true 



AND THE MODERN MIND 115 

to the New Testament and those who cannot 
digest it. 

No doubt the forms in which this truth is 
expressed are not always adequate to the idea 
they are meant to convey, and if we are only 
acquainted with them at second hand they will 
probably appear even less adequate than they 
are. When Athanasius, e.g., speaks of God's 
truth in this connection, and then reduces God's 
truth to the idea that God must keep His word 
— the word which made death the penalty of 
sin — we may feel that the form only too easily 
loses contact with the substance. Yet Atha- 
nasius is dealing with the essential fact of the 
case, that God must be true to Himself, and to 
the moral order in which men live, in all His 
dealings with sin for man's deliverance from it ; 
and that He has been thus true to Himself in 
sending His Son to live our life and to die our 
death for our salvation. Or again, when An- 
selm in the Cur Deus Homo speaks of the 
satisfaction which is rendered to God for the 



n6 THE ATONEMENT 

infringement of His honour by sin— -a satis- 
faction apart from which there can be no for- 
giveness — we may feel again, and even more 
strongly, that the form of the thought is inade- 
quate to the substance. But what Anselm 
means is that sin makes a real difference to 
God, and that even in forgiving God treats 
that difference as real, and cannot do other- 
wise. He cannot ignore it, or regard it as 
other or less than it is; if He did so, He 
would not be more gracious than He is in the 
Atonement, He would cease to be God. It is 
Anselm's profound grasp of this truth which, 
in spite of all its inadequacy in form, and of 
all the criticism to which its inadequacy has 
exposed it, makes the Cur Deus Homo the 
truest and greatest book on the Atonement 
that has ever been written. It is the same 
truth of a divine necessity for the Atone- 
ment which is emphasised by St. Paul in the 
third chapter of Romans, where he speaks of 
Christ's death as a demonstration of God's 



AND THE MODERN MIND 117 

righteousness. Christ's death, we may para- 
phrase his meaning, is an act in which (so far 
as it is ordered in God's providence) God does 
justice to Himself. He does justice to His 
character as a gracious God, undoubtedly, who 
is moved with compassion for sinners: if He 
did not act in a way which displayed His com- 
passion for sinners, He would not do justice 
to Himself; there would be no evSet^t? of His 
hiKaioo-vvrj-. it would be in abeyance: He would 
do Himself an injustice, or be untrue to Himself. 
It is with this in view that we can appreciate the 
arguments of writers like Diestel and Ritschl, 
that God's righteousness is synonymous with 
His grace. Such arguments are true to this 
extent, that God's righteousness includes His 
grace. He could not demonstrate it, He could 
not be true to Himself, if His grace remained 
hidden. We must not, however, conceive of 
this as if it constituted on our side a claim upon 
grace or upon forgiveness : such a claim would 
be a contradiction in terms. All that God does 



n8 THE ATONEMENT 

in Christ He does in free love, moved with com- 
passion for the misery and doom of men. But 
though God's righteousness as demonstrated 
in Christ's death — in other words, His action 
in consistency with His character — includes, 
and, if we choose to interpret the term properly, 
even necessitates, the revelation of His grace, 
it is not this only — I do not believe it is this 
primarily — which St. Paul has here in mind. 
God, no doubt, would not do justice to Himself 
if He did not show His compassion for sinners ; 
but, on the other hand — and here is what the 
apostle is emphasizing — He would not do jus- 
tice to Himself if He displayed His compassion 
for sinners in a way which made light of sin, 
which ignored its tragic reality, or took it for 
less than it is. In this case He would again 
be doing Himself injustice ; there would be no 
demonstration that He was true to Himself 
as the author and guardian of the moral con- 
stitution under which men live ; as Anselm put 
it, He would have ceased to be God. The 



AND THE MODERN MIND 119 

apostle combines the two sides. In Christ set 
forth a propitiation in His blood — in other 
words, in the Atonement in which the sinless 
Son of God enters into the bitter realisation of 
all that sin means for man, yet loves man under 
and through it all with an everlasting love — 
there is an eVSet^t? of God's righteousness, a 
demonstration of His self-consistency, in virtue 
of which we can see how He is at the same 
time just Himself and the justifier of him who 
believes on Jesus, a God who is irreconcilable 
to sin, yet devises means that His banished be 
not expelled from Him. We may say rever- 
ently that this was the only way in which God 
could forgive. He cannot deny Himself, means 
at the same time He cannot deny His grace 
to the sinful, and He cannot deny the moral 
order in which alone He can live in fellowship 
with men ; and we see the inviolableness of 
both asserted in the death of Jesus. Nothing 
else in the world demonstrates how real is 
God's love to the sinful, and how real the sin 



120 THE ATONEMENT 

of the world is to God. And the love which 
comes to us through such an expression, bear- 
ing sin in all its reality, yet loving us through 
and beyond it, is the only love which at once 
forgives and regenerates the soul. 

It becomes credible also that there is a 
human necessity for the Atonement : in other 
words, that apart from it the conditions of being 
forgiven could no more be fulfilled by man than 
forgiveness could be bestowed by God. 

There are different tendencies in the modern 
mind with regard to this point. On the one 
hand, there are those who frankly admit the 
truth here asserted. Yes, they say, the Atone- 
ment is necessary for us. If we are to be saved 
from our sins, if our hearts are to be touched 
and won by the love of God, if we are to be 
emancipated from distrust and reconciled to 
the Father whose love we have injured, there 
must be a demonstration of that love so wonder- 
ful and overpowering that all pride, alienation 
and fear shall be overcome by it ; and this is 



AND THE MODERN MIND 121 

what we have in the death of Christ. It is 
a demonstration of love powerful enough to 
evoke penitence and faith in man, and it is 
through penitence and faith alone that man is 
separated from his sins and reconciled to God. 
A demonstration of love, too, must be given 
in act; it is not enough to be told that God 
loves : the reality of love lies in another region 
than that of words. In Christ on His cross 
the very thing itself is present, beyond all hope 
of telling wonderful, and without its irresistible 
appeal our hearts could never have been melted 
to penitence, and won for God. On the other 
hand, there are those who reject the Atone- 
ment on the very ground that for pardon and 
reconciliation nothing is required but repent- 
ance, the assumption being that repentance is 
something which man can and must produce 
out of his own resources. 

On these divergent tendencies in the mod- 
ern mind I should wish to make the following 
remarks. 



122 THE ATONEMENT 

First, the idea that man can repent as he 
ought, and whenever he will, without coming 
under any obligation to God for his repentance, 
but rather (it might almost be imagined) putting 
God under obligation by it, is one to which ex- 
perience lends no support. Repentance is an 
adequate sense not of our folly, nor of our misery, 
but of our sin : as the New Testament puts it, it 
is repentance toward God. It is the conscious- 
ness of what our sin is to Him: of the wrong it 
does to His holiness, of the wound which it in- 
flicts on His love. Now such a consciousness it 
is not in the power of the sinner to produce at 
will. The more deeply he has sinned, the more 
(so to speak) repentance is needed, the less is it 
in his power. It is the very nature of sin to 
darken the mind and harden the heart, to take 
away the knowledge of God alike in His holiness 
and in His love. Hence it is only through a 
revelation of God, and especially of what God is 
in relation to sin, that repentance can be evoked 
in the soul. Of all terms in the vocabulary of 



AND THE MODERN MIND 123 

religion, repentance is probably the one which 
is most frequently misused. It is habitually 
applied to experiences which are not even 
remotely akin to true penitence. The self- 
centred regret which a man feels when his sin 
has found him out — the wish, compounded of 
pride, shame, and anger at his own inconceivable 
folly, that he had not done it : these are spoken 
of as repentance. But they are not repentance 
at all. They have no relation to God. They 
constitute no fitness for a new relation to Him. 
They are no opening of the heart in the direc- 
tion of His reconciling love. It is the simple 
truth that that sorrow of heart, that healing and 
sanctifying pain in which sin is really put away, 
is not ours in independence of God; it is a 
saving grace which is begotten in the soul under 
that impression of sin which it owes to the 
revelation of God in Christ. A man can no 
more repent than he can do anything else with- 
out a motive, and the motive which makes 
evangelic repentance possible does not enter 



124 THE ATONEMENT 

into his world till he sees God as God makes 
Himself known in the death of Christ. All 
true penitents are children of the Cross. Their 
penitence is not their own creation : it is the 
reaction towards God produced in their souls 
by this demonstration of what sin is to Him, 
and of what His love does to reach and win 
the sinful. 

The other remark I wish to make refers to 
those who admit the death of Christ to be 
necessary for us — necessary, in the way I have 
just described, to evoke penitence and trust in 
God — but who on this very ground deny it to 
be divinely necessary. It had to be, because 
the hard hearts of men could not be touched 
by anything less moving : but that is all. This, 
I feel sure, is another instance of those false 
abstractions to which reference has already 
been made. There is no incompatibility be- 
tween a divine necessity and a necessity for us. 
It may very well be the case that nothing less 
than the death of Christ could win the trust 



AND THE MODERN MIND 125 

of sinful men for God, and at the same time 
that nothing else than the death of Christ could 
fully reveal the character of God in relation at 
once to sinners and to sin. For my own part 
I am persuaded, not only that there is no in- 
compatibility between the two things, but that 
they are essentially related, and that only the 
acknowledgment of the divine necessity in 
Christ's death enables us to conceive in any 
rational way the power which it exercises over 
sinners in inducing repentance and faith. It 
would not evoke a reaction God-ward unless 
God were really present in it, that is, unless 
it were a real revelation of His being and will : 
but in a real revelation of God's being and will 
there can be nothing arbitrary, nothing which 
is determined only from without, nothing, in 
other words, that is not divinely necessary. 
The demonstration of what God is, which is 
made in the death of Christ, is no doubt a 
demonstration singularly suited to call forth 
penitence and faith in man, but the necessity 



126 THE ATONEMENT 

of it does not lie simply in the desire to call 
forth penitence and faith. It lies in the divine 
nature itself. God could not do justice to 
Himself, in relation to man and sin, in any 
way less awful than this; and it is the fact that 
He does not shrink even from this — that in 
the Person of His Son He enters, if we may 
say so, into the whole responsibility of the 
situation created by sin — which constitutes 
the death of Jesus a demonstration of divine 
love, compelling penitence and faith. Nothing 
less would have been sufficient to touch sinful 
hearts to their depths — in that sense the 
Atonement is humanly necessary ; but neither 
would anything else be a sufficient revelation 
of what God is in relation to sin and to sinful 
men — in that sense it is divinely necessary. 
And the divine necessity is the fundamental 
one. The power exercised over us by the 
revelation of God at the Cross is dependent on 
the fact that the revelation is true — in other 
words, that it exhibits the real relation of God 



AND THE MODERN MIND 127 

to sinners and to sin. It is not by calculating 
what will win us, but by acting in consistency 
with Himself, that God irresistibly appeals to 
men. We dare not say that He must be 
gracious, as though grace could cease to be 
free : but we may say that He must be Him- 
self, and that it is because He is what we see 
Him to be in the death of Christ, understood 
as the New Testament understands it, that 
sinners are moved to repentance and to trust 
in Him. That which the eternal being of God 
made necessary to Him in the presence of sin 
is the very thing which is necessary also to win 
the hearts of sinners. Nothing but what is 
divinely necessary could have met the neces- 
sities of sinful men. 

When we admit this twofold necessity for 
the Atonement, we can tell ourselves more 
clearly how we are to conceive Christ in it, in 
relation to God on the one hand and to man 
on the other. The Atonement is God's work. 
It is God who makes the Atonement in Christ. 



128 THE ATONEMENT 

It is God who mediates His forgiveness of 
sins to us in this way. This is one aspect 
of the matter, and probably the one about 
which there is least dispute among Christians. 
But there is another aspect of it. The Media- 
tor between God and man is himself man, 
Christ Jesus. What is the relation of the man 
Christ Jesus to those for whom the Atonement 
is made? What is the proper term to desig- 
nate, in this atoning work, what He is in rela- 
tion to them? The doctrine of Atonement 
current in the Church in the generation pre- 
ceding our own answered frankly that in His 
atoning work Christ is our substitute. He 
comes in our nature, and He comes into our 
place. He enters into all the responsibilities 
that sin has created for us, and He does justice 
to them in His death. He does not deny any 
of them : He does not take sin as anything less 
or else than it is to God ; in perfect sinlessness 
He consents even to die, to submit to that 
awful experience in which the final reaction of 



AND THE MODERN MIND 129 

God's holiness against sin is expressed. Death 
was not His due: it was something alien to 
One Who had nothing amiss ; but it was our 
due, and because it was ours He made it 
His. It was thus that He made Atonement. 
He bore our sins. He took to Himself all 
that they meant, all in which they had involved 
the world. He died for them, and in so doing 
acknowledged the sanctity of that order in 
which sin and death are indissolubly united. 
In other words, He did what the human race 
could not do for itself, yet what had to be done 
if sinners were to be saved : for how could men 
be saved if there were not made in humanity 
an acknowledgment of all that sin is to God, 
and of the justice of all that is entailed by sin 
under God's constitution of the world ? Such 
an acknowledgment, as we have just seen, is 
divinely necessary, and necessary, too, for man, 
if sin is to be forgiven. 

This was the basis of fact on which the sub- 
stitutionary character of Christ's sufferings and 



130 THE ATONEMENT 

death in the Atonement was asserted. It may 
be admitted at once that when the term substi- 
tute is interpreted without reference to this 
basis of fact it lends itself very easily to miscon- 
struction. It falls in with, if it does not sug- 
gest, the idea of a transference of merit and 
demerit, the sin of the world being carried 
over to Christ's account, and the merit of 
Christ to the world's account, as if the recon- 
ciliation of God and man, or the forgiveness of 
sins and the regeneration of souls, could be 
explained without the use of higher categories 
than are employed in book-keeping. It is 
surely not necessary at this time of day to 
disclaim an interpretation of personal relations 
which makes use only of sub-personal cate- 
gories. Merit and demerit cannot be me- 
chanically transferred like sums in an account. 
The credit, so to speak, of one person in the 
moral sphere cannot become that of another, 
apart from moral conditions. It is the same 
truth, in other words, if we say that the figure 



AND THE MODERN MIND 131 

of paying a debt is not in every respect ade- 
quate to describe what Christ does in making 
the Atonement. The figure, I believe, covers 
the truth ; if it did not, we should not have the 
kind of language which frequently occurs in 
Scripture ; but it is misread into falsehood and 
immorality whenever it is pressed as if it were 
exactly equivalent to the truth. But granting 
these drawbacks which attach to the word, is 
there not something in the work of Christ, as 
mediating the forgiveness of sins, which no 
other word can express ? No matter on what 
subsequent conditions its virtue for us depends, 
what Christ did had to be done, or we should 
never have had forgiveness ; we should never 
have known God, and His nature and will in 
relation to sin ; we should never have had the 
motive which alone could beget real repent- 
ance; we should never have had the spirit 
which welcomes pardon and is capable of re- 
ceiving it. We could not procure these things 
for ourselves, we could not produce them out 



132 THE ATONEMENT 

of our own resources : but He by entering into 
our nature and lot, by taking on him our 
responsibilities and dying our death, has so 
revealed God to us as to put them within our 
reach. We owe them to Him; in particular, 
and in the last resort, we owe them to the fact 
that He bore our sins in His own body to the 
tree. If we are not to say that the Atonement, 
as a work carried through in the sufferings and 
death of Christ, sufferings and death deter- 
mined by our sin, is vicarious or substitution- 
ary, what are we to call it ? 

The only answer which has been given to 
this question, by those who continue to speak 
of atonement at all, is that we must conceive 
Christ not as the substitute but as the repre- 
sentative of sinners. I venture to think that, 
with some advantages, the drawbacks of this 
word are quite as serious as those which attach 
to substitute. It makes it less easy, indeed, to 
think of the work of Christ as a finished work 
which benefits the sinner ipso facto, and apart 



AND THE MODERN MIND 133 

from any relation between him and the Saviour: 
but of what sort is the relation which it does 
suggest? It suggests that the sinners who are 
to be saved by Christ can put Christ forward 
in their name : they are not in the utterly 
hopeless case that has hitherto been supposed; 
they can present themselves to God in the 
person and work of One on whom God can- 
not but look with approval. The boldest 
expression of this I have ever seen occurs 
in some remarks in the Primitive Methodist 
Quarterly Review on the doctrine of St. Paul. 
The reviewer is far from saying that a writer 
who finds a substitutionary doctrine through- 
out the New Testament is altogether wrong. 
He goes so far as to admit that 'if we look 
at the matter from what may be called an ex- 
ternal point of view, no doubt we may speak 
of the death of Christ as in a certain sense 
substitutionary.' What this ' certain sense ' 
is, he does not define. But no one, he tells 
us, can do justice to Paul who fails to rec- 



134 THE ATONEMENT 

ognise that the death of Christ was a racial 
act; and 'if we place ourselves at Paul's point 
of view, we shall see that to the eye of God 
the death of Christ presents itself less as an 
act which Christ does for the race than as 
an act which the race does in Christ.' In 
plain English, Paul teaches less that Christ 
died for the ungodly, than that the ungodly 
in Christ died for themselves. This is pre- 
sented to us as something profound, a recogni- 
tion of the mystical depths in Paul's teaching : 
I own I can see nothing profound in it 
except a profound misapprehension of the 
apostle. Nevertheless, it brings out the logic 
of what representative means when represen- 
tative is opposed to substitute. The repre- 
sentative is ours, we are in Him, and we are 
supposed to get over all the moral difficulties 
raised by the idea of substitution just because 
He is ours, and because we are one with Him. 
But the fundamental fact of the situation is 
that, to begin with, Christ is not ours, and 



AND THE MODERN MIND 135 

we are not one with Him. In the apostle's 
view, and in point of fact, we are ' without 
Christ ' (x w />^ XptcrroG). It is not we who 
have put Him there. It is not to us that 
His presence and His work in the world are 
due. If we had produced Him and put 
Him forward, we might call him our repre- 
sentative in the sense suggested by the sen- 
tences just quoted ; we might say it is not 
so much He who dies for us, as we who die 
in Him ; but a representative not produced 
by us, but given to us — not chosen by us, 
but the elect of God — is not a representative 
at all, but in that place a substitute. He 
stands in our stead, facing all our responsibili- 
ties for us as God would have them faced; and 
it is what He does for us, and not the effect 
which this produces in us, still less the fantastic 
abstraction of a ' racial act,' which is the Atone- 
ment in the sense of the New Testament. To 
speak of Christ as our representative, in the 
sense that His death is to God less an act 



136 THE ATONEMENT 

which He does for the race than an act which 
the race does in Him, is in principle to deny 
the whole grace of the gospel, and to rob it of 
every particle of its motive power. 

To do justice to the truth here, both on its 
religious and its ethical side, it is necessary to 
put in their proper relation to one another the 
aspects of reality which the terms substitute 
and representative respectively suggest. The 
first is fundamental. Christ is God's gift to 
humanity. He stands in the midst of us, the 
pledge of God's love, accepting our responsi- 
bilities as God would have them accepted, 
offering to God, under the pressure of the 
world's sin and all its consequences, that per- 
fect recognition of God's holiness in so visit- 
ing sin which men should have offered but 
could not ; and in so doing He makes Atone- 
ment for us. In so doing, also, He is our sub- 
stitute, not yet our representative. But the 
Atonement thus made is not a spectacle, it is a 
motive. It is not a transaction in business, or 



AND THE MODERN MIND 137 

in book-keeping, which is complete in itself; 
in view of the relations of God and man it be- 
longs to its very nature to be a moral appeal. 
It is a divine challenge to men, which is de- 
signed to win their hearts. And when men 
are won — when that which Christ in His love 
has done for them comes home to their souls 
— when they are constrained by His infinite 
grace to the self-surrender of faith, then we may 
say He becomes their representative. They 
begin to feel that what He has done for them 
must not remain outside of them, but be repro- 
duced somehow in their own life. The mind 
of Christ in relation to God and sin, as He 
bore their sins in His own body to the tree, 
must become their mind ; this and nothing else 
is the Christian salvation. The power to work 
this change in them is found in the death of 
Christ itself ; the more its meaning is realised as 
something there, in the world, outside of us, the 
more completely does it take effect within us. 
In proportion as we see and feel that out of 



138 THE ATONEMENT 

pure love to us He stands in our place — our 
substitute — bearing our burden — in that same 
proportion are we drawn into the relation to 
Him that makes Him our representative. But 
we should be careful here not to lose ourselves 
in soaring words. The New Testament has 
much to say about union with Christ, but I 
could almost be thankful that it has no such 
expression as mystical union. The only union 
it knows is a moral one — a union due to the 
moral power of Christ's death, operating mor- 
ally as a constraining motive on the human 
will, and begetting in believers the mind of 
Christ in relation to sin ; but this moral union 
remains the problem and the task, as well as 
the reality and the truth, of the Christian life. 
Even when we think of Christ as our represen- 
tative, and have the courage to say we died 
with Him, we have still to reckon ourselves to 
be dead to sin, and to put to death our mem- 
bers which are upon the earth; and to go 
past this, and speak of a mystical union with 



AND THE MODERN MIND 139 

Christ in which we are lifted above the region 
of reflection and motive, of gratitude and moral 
responsibility, into some kind of metaphysical 
identity with the Lord, does not promote intel- 
ligibility, to say the least. If the Atonement 
were not, to begin with, outside of us — if it were 
not in that sense objective, a finished work in 
which God in Christ makes a final revela- 
tion of Himself in relation to sinners and sin 
— in other words, if Christ could not be con- 
ceived in it as our substitute, given by God 
to do in our place what we could not do for 
ourselves, there would be no way of recognis- 
ing or preaching or receiving it as a motive; 
while, on the other hand, if it did not operate as 
a motive, if it did not appeal to sinful men in 
such a way as to draw them into a moral fel- 
lowship with Christ — in other words, if Christ 
did not under it become representative of us, 
our surety to God that we should yet be even 
as He in relation to God and to sin, we could 
only say that it had all been vain. Union with 



140 THE ATONEMENT 

Christ, in short, is not a presupposition of 
Christ's work, which enables us to escape all 
the moral problems raised by the idea of a sub- 
stitutionary Atonement; it is not a presuppo- 
sition of Christ's work, it is its fruit. To see 
that it is its fruit is to have the final answer to 
the objection that substitution is immoral. If 
substitution, in the sense in which we must as- 
sert it of Christ, is the greatest moral force in 
the world — if the truth which it covers, when it 
enters into the mind of man, enters with divine 
power to assimilate him to the Saviour, uniting 
him to the Lord in a death to sin and a life to 
God — obviously, to call it immoral is an abuse 
of language. The love which can literally go 
out of itself and make the burden of others its 
own is the radical principle of all the genuine 
and victorious morality in the world. And to 
say that love cannot do any such thing, that 
the whole formula of morality is, every man 
shall bear his own burden, is to deny the plain- 
est facts of the moral life. 



AND THE MODERN MIND 141 

Yet this is a point at which difficulty is felt 
by many in trying to grasp the Atonement. 
On the one hand, there do seem to be analo- 
gies to it, and points of attachment for it, in 
experience. No sin that has become real to 
conscience is ever outlived and overcome with- 
out expiation. There are consequences in- 
volved in it that go far beyond our perception 
at the moment, but they work themselves 
inexorably out, and our sin ceases to be a 
burden on conscience, and a fetter on will, 
only as we 'accept the punishment of our 
iniquity,' and become conscious of the holy 
love of God behind it. But the consequences 
of sin are never limited to the sinner. They 
spread beyond him in the organism of human- 
ity, and when they strike visibly upon the 
innocent, the sense of guilt is deepened. We 
see that we have done we know not what, 
something deeply and mysteriously bad beyond 
all our reckoning, something that only a power 
and goodness transcending our own avail to 



142 THE ATONEMENT 

check. It is one of the startling truths of the 
moral life that such consequences of sin, strik- 
ing visibly upon the innocent, have in certain 
circumstances a peculiar power to redeem the 
sinful. When they are accepted, as they 
sometimes are accepted, without repining or 
complaint — when they are borne, as they 
sometimes are borne, freely and lovingly by 
the innocent, because to the innocent the 
guilty are dear — then something is appealed 
to in the guilty which is deeper than guilt, 
something may be touched which is deeper 
than sin, a new hope and faith may be born 
in them, to take hold of love so wonderful, and 
by attaching themselves to it to transcend the 
evil past. The suffering of such love (they 
are dimly aware), or rather the power of such 
love persisting through all the suffering brought 
on it by sin, opens the gate of righteousness 
to the sinful in spite of all that has been ; sin 
is outweighed by it, it is annulled, exhausted, 
transcended in it. The great Atonement of 



AND THE MODERN MIND 143 

Christ is somehow in line with this, and we do 
not need to shrink from the analogy. ' If 
there were no witness,' as Dr. Robertson 
Nicoll puts it, 'in the world's deeper litera- 
ture' — if there were no witness, that is, in 
the universal experience of man — • to the fact 
of an Atonement, the Atonement would be 
useless, since the formula expressing it would 
be unintelligible.' It is the analogy of such 
experiences which makes the Atonement credi- 
ble, yet it must always in some way transcend 
them. There is something in it which is 
ultimately incomparable. When we speak of 
others as innocent, the term is used only 
in a relative sense ; there is no human con- 
science pure to God. When we speak of the 
sin of others coming in its consequences on the 
innocent, we speak of something in which 
the innocent are purely passive; if there is 
moral response on their part, the situation is 
not due to moral initiative of theirs. But with 
Christ it is different. He knew no sin, and 



H4 THE ATONEMENT 

He entered freely, deliberately, and as the very 
work of His calling, into all that sin meant for 
God and brought on man. Something that 
I experience in a particular relation, in which 
another has borne my sin and loved me 
through it, may help to open my eyes to the 
meaning of Christ's love; but when they are 
opened, what I see is the propitiation for 
the whole world. There is no guilt of the 
human race, there is no consequence in wliich 
sin has involved it, to which the holiness and 
love made manifest in Christ are unequal. 
He reveals to all sinful men the whole relation 
of God to them and to their sins — a sanctity 
which is inexorable to sin, and cannot take 
it as other than it is in all its consequences, 
and a love which through all these conse- 
quences and under the weight of them all, will 
not let the sinful go. It is in this revelation 
of the character of God and of His relation to 
the sin of the world that Ibe^orgiveness of sins 
is revealed. It is not intimated in the air; it 



AND THE MODERN MIND 145 

is preached, as St. Paul says, 'in this man'; it is 
mediated to the world through Him and specif- 
ically through His death, because it is through 
Him, and specifically through His death, that 
we get the knowledge of God's character 
which evokes penitence and faith, and brings 
the assurance of His pardon to the heart. 

From this point of view we may see how to 
answer the question that is sometimes asked 
about the relation of Christ's life to His death, 
or about the relation of both to the Atonement. 
If we say that what we have in the Atonement 
is an assurance of God's character, does it not 
follow at once that Christ's teaching and His 
life contribute to it as directly as His death ? 
Is it not a signal illustration of the false ab- 
stractions which we have so often had cause 
to censure, when the death of Christ is taken 
as if it had an existence or a significance apart 
from His life, or could be identified with the 
Atonement in a way in which His life could 
not? I do not think this is so clear. Of 



146 THE ATONEMENT 

course it is Christ Himself who is the Atone- 
ment or propitiation — He Himself, as St. 
John puts it, and not anything, not even His 
death, into which He does not enter. But 
it is He Himself, as making to us the revela- 
tion of God in relation to sin and to sinners ; 
and apart from death, as that in which the 
conscience of the race sees the final reaction 
of God against evil, this revelation is not fully 
made. If Christ had done less than die for us, 
therefore — if He had separated Himself from 
us, or declined to be one with us, in the solemn 
experience in which the darkness of sin is 
sounded and all its bitterness tasted, — there 
would have been no Atonement. It is impos- 
sible to say this of any particular incident in 
His life, and in so far the unique emphasis laid 
on His death in the New Testament is justified. 
But I should go further than this, and say that 
even Christ's life, taking it as it stands in the 
Gospels, only enters into the Atonement, and 
has reconciling power, because it is pervaded 



AND THE MODERN MIND 147 

from beginning to end by the consciousness 
of His death. Instead of depriving His death 
of the peculiar significance Scripture assigns 
to it, and making it no more than the termina- 
tion, or at least the consummation, of His life, 
I should rather argue that the Scriptural em- 
phasis is right, and that His life attains its true 
interpretation only as we find in it everywhere 
the power and purpose of His death. There 
is nothing artificial or unnatural in this. There 
are plenty of people who never have death out 
of their minds an hour at a time. They are 
not cowards, nor mad, nor even sombre : they 
may have purposes and hopes and gaieties as 
well as others; but they see life steadily and 
see it whole, and of all their thoughts the one 
which has most determining and omnipresent 
power is the thought of the inevitable end. 
There is death in all their life. It was not, 
certainly, as the inevitable end, the inevitable 
'debt of nature,' that death was present to the 
mind of Christ ; but if we can trust the Evan- 



148 THE ATONEMENT 

gelists at all, from the hour of His baptism 
it was present to His mind as something in- 
volved in His vocation ; and it was a presence 
so tremendous that it absorbed everything into 
itself. ' I have a baptism to be baptized with, 
and how am I straitened till it be accom- 
plished.' Instead of saying that Christ's life 
as well as His death contributed to the Atone- 
ment — that His active obedience (to use the 
theological formula) as well as His passive 
obedience was essential to His propitiation 
— we should rather say that His life is part 
of His death: a deliberate and conscious de- 
scent, ever deeper and deeper, into the dark 
valley where at the last hour the last reality 
of sin was to be met and borne. And if the ob- 
jection is made that after all this only means 
that death is the most vital point of life, its 
intensest focus, I should not wish to make 
any reply. Our Lord's Passion is His sub- 
limest action — an action so potent that all 
His other actions are sublated in it, and we 



AND THE MODERN MIND 149 

know everything when we know that He died 
for our sins. 

The desire to bring the life of Christ as well 
as His death into the Atonement has probably 
part of its motive in the feeling that when the 
death is separated from the life it loses moral 
character : it is reduced to a merely physical 
incident, which cannot carry such vast sig- 
nificance as the Atonement. Such a feeling 
certainly exists, and finds expression in many 
forms. How often, for example, we hear it 
said that it is not the death which atones, but 
the spirit in which the Saviour died — not 
His sufferings which expiate sin, but the in- 
nocence, the meekness, the love to man and 
obedience to God in which they were borne. 
The Atonement, in short, was a moral achieve- 
ment, to which physical suffering and death 
are essentially irrelevant. This is our old 
enemy, the false abstraction, once more, and 
that in the most aggressive form. The contrast 
of physical and moral is made absolute at the 



1 5 o THE ATONEMENT 

very point at which it ceases to exist. As 
against such absolute distinctions we must hold 
that if Christ had not really died for us, there 
would have been no Atonement at all, and on 
the other hand that what are called His physical 
sufferings and death have no existence simply 
as physical : they are essential elements in the 
moral achievement of the passion. It leads to 
no truth to say that it is not His death, but the 
spirit in which He died, that atones for sin : 
the spirit in which He died has its being in His 
death, and in nothing else in the world. 

It seems to me that what is really wanted 
here, both by those who seek to co-ordinate 
Christ's life with His death in the Atonement, 
and by those who distinguish between His 
death and the spirit in which He died, is some 
means of keeping hold of the Person of Christ 
in His work, and that this is not effectively 
done apart from the New Testament belief in 
the Resurrection. There is no doubt that 
in speaking of the death of Christ as that 



AND THE MODERN MIND 151 

through which the forgiveness of sins is medi- 
ated to us we are liable to think of it as if 
it were only an event in the past. We take 
the representation of it in the Gospel and say, 
" Such and such is the impression which this 
event produces upon me ; I feel in it how God 
is opposed to sin, and how I ought to be op- 
posed to it ; I feel in it how God's love appeals 
to me to share His mind about sin ; and as I 
yield to this appeal I am at once set free from 
sin and assured of pardon ; this is the only 
ethical forgiveness; to know this experiment- 
ally is to know the Gospel." No one can 
have any interest in disputing another's obliga- 
tion to Christ, but it may fairly be questioned 
whether this kind of obligation to Christ 
amounts to Christianity in the sense of the 
New Testament. There is no living Christ 
here, no coming of the living Christ to the 
soul, in the power of the Atonement, to bring 
it to God. But this is what the New Testa- 
ment shows us. It is He who is the propitia- 



152 THE ATONEMENT 

tion for our sins — He who died for them and 
rose again. The New Testament preaches a 
Christ who was dead and is alive, not a Christ 
who was alive and is dead. It is a mistake to 
suppose that the New Testament conception 
of the Gospel, involving as it does the spiritual 
presence and action of Christ, in the power 
of the Atonement, is a matter of indifference 
to us, and that in all our thinking and preach- 
ing we must remain within purely historical 
limits, if by purely historical limits is meant 
that our creed must end with the words "cruci- 
fied, dead, and buried." To preach the Atone- 
ment means not only to preach One who bore 
our sins in death, but One who by rising again 
from the dead demonstrated the final defeat of 
sin, and One who comes in the power of His 
risen life — which means, in the power of the 
Atonement accepted by God — to make all 
who commit themselves to Him in faith par- 
takers in His victory. It is not His death, 
as an incident in the remote past, however 



AND THE MODERN MIND 153 

significant it may be ; it is the Lord Himself, 
appealing to us in the virtue of His death, 
who assures us of pardon and restores our 
souls. 

One of the most singular phenomena in the 
attitude of many modern minds to the Atone- 
ment is the disposition to plead against the 
Atonement what the New Testament repre- 
sents as its fruits. It is as though it had done 
its work so thoroughly that people could not 
believe that it ever needed to be done at all. 
The idea of fellowship with Christ, for example, 
is constantly urged against the idea that Christ 
died for us, and by His death made all mankind 
His debtors in a way in which we cannot make 
debtors of each other. The New Testament 
itself is pressed into the service. It is pointed 
out that our Lord called His disciples to 
drink of His cup and to be baptized with His 
baptism, where the baptism and the cup are 
figures of His passion 5 and it is argued that 
there cannot be anything unique in His expe- 



i 5 4 THE ATONEMENT 

Hence or service, anything which He does for 
men which it is beyond the power of His dis- 
ciples to do also. Or again, reference is made 
to St. Paul's words to the Colossians : ' Now I 
rejoice in my sufferings on your behalf, and fill 
up on my part that which is lacking of the 
afflictions of Christ in my flesh for His body's 
sake, which is the Church ; ' and it is argued 
that St. Paul here represents himself as doing 
exactly what Christ did, or even as supple- 
menting a work which Christ admittedly left 
imperfect. The same idea is traced where the 
Christian is represented as called into the 
fellowship of the Son of God, or more specifi- 
cally as called to know the fellowship of His 
sufferings by becoming conformed to His 
death. It is seen pervading the New Testa- 
ment in the conception of the Christian as a 
man in Christ. And to descend from the 
apostolic age to our own, it has been put by an 
American theologian into the epigrammatic 
form that Christ redeems us by making us 



AND THE MODERN MIND 155 

redeemers. What, it may be asked, is the 
truth in all this ? and how is it related to what 
we have already seen cause to assert about the 
uniqueness of Christ's work in making atone- 
ment for sin, or mediating the divine forgive- 
ness to man ? 

I do not think it is impossible or even 
difficult to reconcile the two : it is done, indeed, 
whenever we see that the life to which we are 
summoned, in the fellowship of Christ, is a life 
which we owe altogether to Him, and which 
He does not in the least owe to us. The 
question really raised is this : Has Jesus Christ 
a place of His own in the Christian religion ? 
Is it true that there is one Mediator between 
God and man, Himself man, this man, Christ 
Jesus? In spite of the paradoxical assertion 
of Harnack to the contrary, it is not possible 
to deny, with any plausibility, that this was the 
mind of Christ Himself, and that it has been the 
mind of all who call Him Lord. He knew 
and taught, what they have learned by expe- 



156 THE ATONEMENT 

rience as well as by His word, that all men 
must owe to him their knowledge of the 
Father, their place in the Kingdom of God, 
and their part in all its blessings. He could 
not have taught this of any but Himself, 
nor is it the experience of the Church that 
such blessings come through any other. 
Accordingly, when Christ calls on men to 
drink His cup and to be baptized with His 
baptism, while He may quite well mean, and 
does mean, that His life and death are 
to be the inspiration of theirs, and while 
He may quite well encourage them to believe 
that sacrifice on their part, as on His, will con- 
tribute to bless the world, He need not mean, 
and we may be sure He does not mean, that 
their blood is, like His, the blood of the cove- 
nant, or that their sinful lives, even when 
purged and quickened by His Spirit, could be, 
like his sinless life, described as the world's 
ransom. The same considerations apply to 
the passages quoted from St. Paul, and espe- 



AND THE MODERN MIND 157 

daily to the words in Colossians i. 24. The 
very purpose of the Epistle to the Colossians 
is to assert the exclusive and perfect mediator- 
ship of Christ, alike in creation and redemption ; 
all that we call being, and all that we call recon- 
ciliation, has to be defined by relation to Him, 
and not by relation to any other persons or 
powers, visible or invisible ; and however gladly 
Paul might reflect that in his enthusiasm for 
suffering he was continuing Christ's work, and 
exhausting some of the afflictions — they were 
Christ's own afflictions — which had yet to be 
endured ere the Church could be made perfect, 
it is nothing short of grotesque to suppose that 
in this connection he conceived of himself as 
doing what Christ did, atoning for sin, and 
reconciling the world to God. All this was 
done already, perfectly done, done for the 
whole world ; and it was on the basis of it, and 
under the inspiration of it, that the apostle 
sustained his enthusiasm for a life of toil and 
pain in the service of men. Always, where we 



158 THE ATONEMENT 

have Christian experience to deal with, it is the 
Christ through whom the divine forgiveness 
comes to us at the Cross — the Christ of the 
substitutionary Atonement, who bore all our 
burden alone, and did a work to which we can 
forever recur, but to which we did not and do 
not and never can contribute at all — it is this 
Christ who constrains us to find our repre- 
sentative with God in Himself, and to become 
ourselves His representatives to man. It is as 
we truly represent Him that we can expect our 
testimony to Him to find acceptance, but that 
testimony far transcends everything that our 
service enables men to measure. What is any- 
thing that a sinful man, saved by grace, can do 
for his Lord or for his kind, compared with 
what the sinless Lord has done for the sinful 
race ? It is true that He calls us to drink of 
His cup, to learn the fellowship of His suffer- 
ings, even to be conformed to His death ; but 
under all the intimate relationship the eternal 
difference remains which makes Him Lord — 



AND THE MODERN MIND 159 

He knew no sin, and we could make no atone- 
ment It is the goal of our life to be found in 
Him ; but I cannot understand the man who 
thinks it more profound to identify himself with 
Christ and share in the work of redeeming the 
world, than to abandon himself to Christ and 
share in the world's experience of being re- 
deemed. And I am very sure that in the New 
Testament the last is first and fundamental. 



7 1903 



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